Spending Fast

Chris and I have decided to do a spending fast for the year, which is a great way to save money and or pay off debt, and is the brain child of Anna Newell at And Then We Saved. The spending fast is different for everyone, based on priorities and needs, but it comes down to making drastic cuts in your spending so that you are able to save more. Eventually, it also lets you see where your money is going and possibly help you to make permanent changes regarding spending that isn't necessary or that can be scaled back.

We've decided to do the spending fast so that we can make a dent in my graduate student loans. We had at first decided not to aggressively pay them off, because they're "good debt", right? Well, we are now in the mindset that any debt we have is annoying and we want it gone. The only other debt we have is the house, and I'm not sure if we'll ever be aggressive about paying off the mortgage, but that's a different story that I'm going to touch on later.

So what are the rules for our spending fast? Here they are:

- Only one meal out each month as a family

- Only one lunch out each month at work

- Only one coffee shop outing each month

- No buying any convenience food or drinks, like from vending machines or fast food joints 

- No buying alcohol (it's a good thing we have a healthy stock of wine!)

- No buying new clothes

- No entertainment purchases (although we did get multiple gift cards to the movies that we will be using, so thanks friends and family! And we're going to see The Book of Mormon next month, but we bought those tickets in November;)

- No buying books, although we've been pretty good on this one for awhile

- No buying gifts, except for our kid, nieces and nephews, baby showers, weddings. I know that doesn't seem like we're cutting out that much, but we give a lot of gifts to family and friends, which we love to do, but cutting that out will help us save a lot. And for the baby showers and weddings, we feel we've got to give back to those people who were so generous to us when we hit those milestones. 

- No buying any toys for Evey. This might seem heartless and contrary to what the last rule stated, but our kid has enough, and by that I mean too many, toys, and I'm sure she's going to amass some more this year. For Christmas we didn't get her a single toy, and instead we got her books, two shirts, a training potty, and a months's worth of music classes. 

Things we're going to spend money on:

- We've got two weddings coming up this year and we're planning on visiting my Nannie at some point, so we'll pay to travel, but we've been racking up Southwest points with our Southwest credit card.

- Parties! We love our parties and we would be pretty bummed if we cancelled them, but I'm going to get creative and scale back a bit, ha! No, no, I really will, and we're planning on hosting four parties this year, so I've gotta start planning now! I'll post my money savings party tips when I've come up with them;)

I'm very excited about The Spending Fast! It's only been a couple weeks, but I can already feel my priorities shifting. I've been meal planning and freezing food and so we haven't felt the need to grab a bite out. We don't really go out all that much, and so the outside entertainment thing won't be a big deal, but when we get bored we've got Netflix, Amazon Prime, video games, wonderful friends and family to hang out with, a house that still needs some purging, the park, The Discovery, not to mention any other virtually free thing we do that I'm forgetting. 

I definitely don't feel we're going to miss out on anything, and I'm so excited to start our journey to aggressively pay off my student loan debt and be debt free, minus our mortgage, of course. 

What do you think? Would you ever try a spending fast?

Book Challenge Update for 2015

My book reading challenge for 2015 was pretty lame as my goal was only 10 books. One day that number will go back up into the 20s or 30s, but for now, that's where I am. But I read 12 books! Yay for me! And I started reading a wonderful, and long, book in October, which I still need to finish; of course I blame the holidays for that. 

My favorite books for this year included:

"American Gods" by Neil Gaiman. After reading "Neverwhere", which is now my favorite book, I knew I needed to read more Gaiman! This book was amazing, and because I don't really like to write book reviews, I'm not going to, but I gave it five stars on goodreads. Also, Chris was interested in it after hearing my glowing non-review, so he listened to it and loved it as well. Just as a side note, he's been doing this a lot lately, which is great because it's probably the best way for him to "read" books; he's currently reading the Game of Thrones series. As another side note, he checks out the audio books digitally from the library and listens to them from his phone, genius;)

"The Book of Flying" by Keith Miller. Holy crap this book was gorgeous, tragic, uplifting, terrifying, and inspiring all at the same time. Everything was beautifully written and I want more from this author.

So my book challenge for this year will be 12, which is still pretty lame, but I've upped the ante a bit. I've just gotta figure out how to carve out some more reading time...

Murder Mystery Party and New Year's Eve 2015

So our awesome centering baby group parents all got together for a murder mystery party in December! Ashley and Jordan wrote it themselves and hosted the whole thing! It was amazing and so much fun; I think we're going to make it an annual thing;) 

If you've never participated in a murder mystery party, you should, and if you've never heard of one, then I suggest you google it! Each person has a character to play, and Chris and I were recently married white trash cousins;) 

Oh man, the stuff we did/said...it was a great evening! Big thanks to Ashley and Jordan do an amazing evening!

For New Year's we hung out with the McLaughlins in G-Ville and had too much wonderful food and did a whole lotta nothing. Jen made amazing pink moscato champagne floats with blood orange sherbet! 

We had Xmas gifts to open, and Evey scored big time with some wonderful gifts!

I love that every time we visit with the McLaughlins, Evey is more and more chatty and loving. She gave everyone multiple hugs and kisses! 

I'm excited for 2016! We're hopefully going to make some big changes this year, which ill apprise you of later:)

Santa Visits 2015

So Evey got to meet Santa three times this past holiday season! Is she in any of the photos by herself? No! Mom and dad show up in all of them, but that's ok, we already have a crying Santa photo from the previous year, we don't need any more. 

Our first Santa sighting happened in the very beginning of December at our friends' house. They threw an awesome Polar Express Party and their friend, whom we've met before, was Santa, and he did an amazing job! We had cookies and cocoa, and our friends even tied silver bells onto all of the gifts that Santa handed out, which was a very nice touch. 

Our second Santa sighting was at The Nurturing Nest, where we saw Santa last year, which was also the scene of the aforementioned crying incident. We attempted a solo picture and quickly saw that that was not going to happen as our child can now walk and will not simply sit on a stranger's lap and cry anymore. So we took a lovely Santa family photo!

Our third Santa sighting was at daycare, and this picture include just Evey and Chris. I do not have the details for this sighting, and I only have a print photo, nothing digital, but I'll scan it soon.

I have no idea how she'll react to Santa next year, but my bet is that she'll still be pretty apprehensive. Honestly, it's not necessarily a bad thing that my kid, or most kids, are freaked out to sit on a stranger's lap. It's a bit hypocritical of us to tell our wee ones to avoid strangers and then we force them to sit on a stranger's lap once a year! (Or twice a year, if you count oversized bunnies around Easter;)

Our Birthdays 2015

So December is insane for everyone, typically, and for us we like to add to the crazy by having our birthdays fall smack dab in the middle of the month, along with a handful of other close friends and family members as well. And being the party loving people we are, we must always have a party! We're back to doing joint birthday parties now that both of our 30th birthdays have come and gone, scary...and I've got to choose some kind of theme to work with and I chose to have a green with envy party! Most of the food was green, we wore green, and we had a ton of green balloons floating around, so we stuck to the theme pretty well. I didn't take any photos with my phone, and only have a family shot of us that a friend took, but I will add the photos Chris took with his camera soon.

Evey's dress was so adorable, and we got it from Sippee's, so yay for second hand! My crazy spangled shirt was also second hand and I got it from Sippee's parent store, Junkee. Chris could not settle on a clothing item from Junkee so he decided to settle on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shirt from Target, always the classy guy;)

We threw our birthday party on Chris' birthday, which ended up being an absolutely horrible snowy day, and a lot of our family and friends had to leave early so that they wouldn't be snowed in. Honestly, it's not the first time, and I'm sure if wont be the last, curse you winter birthdays! But it's all good because we had a great time with everyone and were absolutely grateful to everyone who came out and everyone who wished us happy birthdays.

The day before the party we went to The Isles to have high tea and it'll probably be the last time we bring Evey there for at least three years;) She was pretty antsy and we eventually gave up and handed her my phone with Peg + Cat going and a scone. She was quite content after that.

It was another lovely birthday celebration!

Christmas 2015

We ventured to Vegas again for Xmas, but did not drive again, that would be a big hell no, after what happened last year, so we flew, and we were all much happier;) The visit was jam packed with family and friend visits, naturally, and so we had a whirlwind five days!

This girl was all over the airport this time! She was incredibly intrigued by the suitcase weighing machines and the slot machines in the terminal. She definitely didn't let a late flight, which was even later due to crappy weather, slow her down!

We just hung out at Chris' parents house the next morning. Evey had fun exploring while we chatted up the parents.

And she had a blast playing with Grandpa! Later that day we went to Justin's for Christmas Eve dinner and we spent the night too. Lots of food, family, and friends.

The next day, Christmas Day! we got up at our usual early morning time and waited for everyone else to get up and get ready so we could go to Chris' grandma's house to celebrate with even more family! We exchanged Secret Santa gifts and ate more amazing food!

We didn't get back to Chris' parents house until 8:30, and we had Evey open her gifts. I'm a horrible parent and didn't take any photos of her doing this, it must have completely slipped my mind! But she enjoyed tearing through bags and wrapping paper and thoroughly ignoring the gifts that they contained, like all good 19 month olds do.

The next day I was the first to get up, probably due to the fact that I had developed pink eye! Not fun to get that, obviously, but it really sucks when you're not home and you don't bring your glasses with you...all I can say is that the next couple days sucked vision wise, and I spent a lovely 3 hours at the urgent care. Good times. 

That day we also met up with some of my high school buddies, which always makes me happy.

Chris saw Star Wars the night before we left with his dad and Steffen, so me, Debi, Nichole, and Evey all got to enjoy each other's company, and some late night Starbucks

Until next time, grandparents!

Thanksgiving in Tennessee

For Thanksgiving this year we visited my parents and brother in Tennessee, and my Kristin and her family came too! It was a whirlwind trip of hanging out, visiting the aquarium, eating, drinking, and visiting with extended family! It was funny to watch Evey and Collin interact; they are very different toddlers;)

We celebrated Xmas with my family and aunt, uncle, and cousins; my mom even decorated early! So the kiddos had plenty to play with while we were there!

We had breakfast at the Vegas airport. She slept from Reno to Vegas, which is wonderful because she got up at 4;)

We had a really long travel day because we decided to save money and drive from Nashville to Seymour, which was a little over three hours, instead of flying into Knoxville. I was exhausted, but I don't think I'd do anything differently.

Evey and Grandad chillin.

My parents got her a stroller and baby doll, which she pushed everywhere! She even made sure she gave her baby a bottle on occasion. She hasn't played with her much at home, it's probably due to the fact that she has too many toys!

Group photo with my cousin Madison, her niece, and Collin.

She seems so innocent, doesn't she?:)

Evey did not voluntarily walk to anyone in the beginning, so Uncle Andrew lured  her over with TV, genius!

 

We all went to the Ripley's Aquarium. My cousin and her baby from Georgia joined us too!

Swimming with the fishes.

My cousin Christina with the pops and husband.

This was our whole group, minus the photographer, of course.

Crazy family selfies are awesome!

Evey enjoyed playing with Collin's chain saw...

And Collin enjoyed playing with her baby 

 

Aunt Kristin was able to snag some Evey time.

Oh yah, this was Evey's thanksgiving dinner, a roll. <sigh> My mom made an amazing Thanksgiving meal, as always, and we went to my Aunt Sandra's for dessert, which was also absolutely amazing. Christina made the best bread pudding!

We took photos in front of my parents' house the day we left, so I will share those soon, but here's one that Kristin took of Chris holding the wee ones and the comparison from 14 months ago! We've decided to do this every single time we meet, and Chris said that he will continue to hold them both, we'll see about that;)