Today I am joining several other personal finance bloggers in a $100 cash giveaway! The giveaway entry form appears at the bottom of this post. You may enter multiple times for many different chances at winning! **If you don’t mind, please make the WhatMommyDoes Twitter entry option your first stopping point!** The giveaway’s theme is “Finances in the New Year.” To kick [...]

I have a habit of attaching catchy phrases to situations in my life where decisions are required. These little phrases help me stay on track without having to over think my decision. 5 Words That Have Saved Me Thousands of Dollars… “Did I need it yesterday?” is the catch phrase I use most often when faced with a small purchase [...]

When I first decided to start budgeting before the birth of our first child, I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know how much money we spent, and I am ashamed to say that I also did not know exactly how much money we had at our disposal each month after taxes and retirement contributions. Needless to say, I [...]

Anyone who’s ever tried to put together a family budget knows that it’s no easy task. Every family is so different, it’s difficult to give a standard example of expense categories for a monthly budget. What one family considers important might not be on another’s radar, and everyone makes different amounts of income, adding to the differences. Low income and [...]

Do you ever get tired of being careful with your money?  I do.  I have a website about taxes, I write articles on personal finance topics, and I consider myself pretty strict with myself when it comes to spending money. But my self-discipline has its limits. Take, for instance, the time in our life (me and my husband’s) when we [...]

When my first child was born, I was still trying to figure out how we would be able to live on one income.  Even though we had been fairly successful a doing so in the year-and-a-half long trial run leading up to her birth (we started pretending like we didn’t have my income well before we needed to), I went [...]

Four years ago, I transitioned from a stressful desk job to being to a stay at home mom. How our family manages live on one income is probably the thing I got asked most about when friends and family learned I wasn’t going back to work after my maternity leave ended, so I figure lots of people are interested in this very [...]