It’s Sunday… time for the weekly roundup from the Frugal Blog Network. We have a new member – a big welcome to Kelly from Almost Frugal. Kelly gave me some cloth diapers earlier this year, and my son is still wearing them. I’ve had a soft spot for her every since, so I’m thrilled that she’s joined the FBN. She lives in France, so she brings some international flair to the network. And she has a great post this week, on the ABCs of Frugality. I see myself in a lot of those letters…
Andy from Tight Fisted Miser had a rough week – he got robbed, and is having to get a new phone, keys, and possibly locks (and maybe a new job – check out his post about it). But he had a great post about his take on Dave Ramsey’s baby steps. I agree on the retirement savings. My husband and I both had 401k accounts when we left our corporate jobs several years ago. We rolled them over to IRAs, but didn’t contribute to them for the first year while we were getting our business going. We were just too broke. Then after a year, we started putting $100/month into each IRA, and gradually worked up until we now max them out. When we started contributing to the IRAs again, we had no emergency fund, and we had quite a bit of debt. But we knew we’d never get those years back as far as retirement contributions went. We’re now contributing to an emergency fund and don’t have any credit card debt, but our retirement funds are still priority over our emergency fund.
Shanti at Antishay Ventenne hosted the Festival of Frugality this week, and did a great job with it. If you haven’t visited it yet, check it out when you’re looking for good frugal ideas.
Not Made Of Money has a good post about how to stick to your shopping list and minimize the damage at the checkout when you go grocery shopping. Costco used to be our downfall on this – they always have stuff that you didn’t know you needed… But we’ve gotten better, mainly because we’re eating very little packaged or processed food these days. So our Costco trips tend to be for stuff like razor blades and frozen blueberries (and a few other things I suppose, since we spend at least $200/month there…)
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