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The Starting Line - Familywise

7/30/2013

See above for a typical evening in our household - pre-Frugal August.

Note the positioning of the hands for optimum thumb control of cribbage cards. This has been perfected through hours of experimentation. Any question asked to this man will almost certainly be answered with a pause, and then, "Huh? What'd you say?" Don't get me wrong - I'm equally guilty. I don't know if Candy Crush Addicts Anonymous exists, but I may be in need of a support group. Must....clear...the jelly..... If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's a good sign. Don't ever find out.

We're addicted to our smartphones. I feel ridiculous telling the little FA to "Put down that Kindle right now and pay attention!" when both her father and I are glued to our three and a half inch screens. There are plenty of nights when we're putting on a TV show on Netflix, sitting on the couch and playing games on our phones without even really keeping track of what's on the TV. This has to stop.

One of the goals of Frugal August is to reconnect. Reconnect with each other as a family, reconnect with our bodies, reconnect with the world that exists outside of Facebook, video games, TV and the almighty Internet. Admittedly, we're using the Internet to share this experience, but hey, all things in moderation, right? The funny thing is that we talk about how wonderful it is when we go camping and turn our phones off. Turns out, we can do that AT HOME, too?!?!?!

The plan for this month is no TV and minimal laptop/cell phone/electronic use. Especially during the evenings, when we should be enjoying what little free time we do have during the week by spending time with our family.

Who knows what we'll do with all this spare time? Will Mr. FA get flabby thumbs without daily online cribbage tournaments? Will Mrs. FA get passed by all those other Candy Crush players on the candy trail?!?!?!?! Stay tuned to find out!!

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The Starting Line - Moneywise

7/29/2013

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Alrighty - in order to use fewer resources (AKA...money), we had to know where most of them were going to begin with. After dinner one evening, we printed out every payslip, bank statement and credit card statement, and made a nifty Excel file that categorized all of our expenses. The top ten are shown at right. In case you were wondering, the categories not shown included hobbies, pets, restaurants, gym fees, entertainment, and fast food. Even though these categories didn't make it into our top ten expenditures, we're still going to work to cut costs in them.

There are some interesting things we found as we created this chart. The first is that we're actually doing pretty darn well. The only debt we have is our mortgage (thanks to a couple years of bonuses and some inheritance stuff), and we're saving at a healthy 10% rate. However, one of the goals of Frugal August is to figure out if we can increase our savings enough through simpler living to start living REAL simple (AKA, retire) a little earlier. This means that we want that green pie slice in the chart above to get a little bigger this month.

So, what are we going to do to get that green slice bigger? Why, make some other slices smaller of course! How we're going to accomplish that we'll share with you day by day in August. However, just to get us jump started, I've already done the following:

Reduced our internet speed from "Premier" to "Preferred" - That's Cox Cable speak for 50Mbps to 15Mbps. We'll let you know if we can see any difference. - Savings: $11 / month.
Upped the 401K deposits from 7% to 10%. This means we're not paying taxes on those dollars, and we just made the green slice a little bit bigger and the blue slice a little smaller - go us! - Savings: $36 / month.
Called the car insurance folks and reduced the coverage on Mr. FA's personal vehicle. We don't owe anything on it, and we have enough in savings to replace it if the worst happened. Hell, between his work truck, my truck, the motorcycle and bicycles, we don't really need that vehicle anyway. - Savings: $12 / month.

I'm going to now go spend an hour knocking on wood that publishing #3 above doesn't mean the Jeep will get struck by lightening tomorrow. Have a great night!

<3,

Mr. and Mrs. FA

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The Starting Line - Familywise

The Starting Line - Moneywise

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