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Well, the blog has been up and running for one month now! And it was a great month of learning and new experiences and finding new ways to live frugal. It all started with my explanation of why I wanted to start a PF blog.

I explored the concept of snowflaking and found that my dollar round up is going to be one of my normal and consistent snowflakes. It’s something I’ve always done, but didn’t realize how much it could help!

I started to play the drugstore game at Walgreens and Rite Aid. I’m starting to get the hang of it and it’s saving us so much money.

Dave and I did some home canning in the kitchen when we made jam and dill pickles. This, I think, is going to be a fun hobby for us both to enjoy and the end products turned out to be incredibly delicious. The startup costs were under $100 for the supplies, and it’s something that we will continue to do in the future.

I had a situation on my hands when it came to my rollover 401(k) from my previous job and was left wondering what to do with it. After some helpful input from readers and a trip to the bank, I was able to get everything straightened out and hopefully things will be easily maintained.

Getting an eye exam, new contacts, and new glasses set us back nearly $500 and I had to take away from our vacation fund temporarily (rather than charge it). That was discouraging.

What Was Spent?

At the beginning of the month I decided to start doing menu plans for our meals and to start cooking at home most (if not all) of the time. This helped to cut grocery costs tremendously. For example, in June we spent $418 on groceries and in July we only spent $201, which is roughly $50 a week.

This obviously effected our dining out costs (in a good way!). We used to grab fast food or dinner out at restaurants a lot and I decided that had to change. In June we spent $367 on dining out (oh my goodness!) and in July we only spent $119. Which is still a bit higher, but we had friends over one night and got pizza, plus we went out to dinner with friends after a movie the other night. Mix in a few lunches here and there with my best friend who I rarely see, and it adds up.

We must not be driving as much lately because our gas costs went down, also. In June we had spent $265 on gas, whereas we only spent $177 in July. Works for me! It helps that the gas prices are finally going down, too, though.

Income & Snowflakes

We had a monthly income of $3,700 from Dave’s job and my unemployment income. There was one good check of Dave’s that had quite a bit of overtime on it, so that bumped up our income by a few hundred dollars, which was nice.

I earned $310 from selling things on ebay (most of that was from selling my laptop for $250). I also earned $50 from PayU2Blog, $25 from ExpoTV and $6 from Pinecone Research. There was another $45 from my sister who I had loaned money to and she paid back, almost $34 in interest and a signup bonus from ING, and finally $24.73 from other online survey places and such. This brought our total non-regular income to $494.79 (which went to snowflakes).

As far as snowflakes go, I was able to put $658.01 into our snowflake account (of which $388 went towards my eye exam/glasses and another $200 was sent to a credit card). Dollar Round Up consisted of $31.67 of this! Not bad for simply rounding every transaction up to the nearest dollar, huh?

The Nitty Gritty

Now here’s the rough details and numbers that show how we fare. We were $44,584.52 in debt when I started this blog a month ago on July 1st. Let’s take a look at how things are going for us after our first month of trying to cut back.

• Credit Cards came in at $23,373.93 on 7/1/08 and are now down to $23,004.36, which is a decrease of $369.57 or 2%. This would’ve been better except that I had to charge some eyecare costs. We accrued $261.22 in interest on all of our credit cards.

• Our student loans started at $7,391.68 on 7/1/08 and are now up to $7,398.36 which is an increase of $6.68. Despite my $160 payment, there was an accrued interest that kicked in for, so it didn’t really help.

• The car loan started at $13,818.91on 7/1/08 and is now down to $13,506.82, a decrease of $312.09 or 2%.

• Our vacation savings fun was going really well until I had to withdraw a big chunk to pay back my eye care bill that I put on a credit card at the time because I didn’t think it was going to cost that much. So I pretty much drained it from $605 down to $200. And I’m using $200 to send to one of my credit cards (it’s all snowflaked money) on August 1st. So the current balance of of the vacation fund is $66.38, but it will be up past $700 by 9/6/08 before leaving on vacation. I’ve already got it all planned out.

• Investment accounts went up (on a cash basis) from $9,335 to $9,385 (1% increase) due to a $50 contribution to my Sharebuilder’s Roth IRA through ING.

• Overall assets went up by 7% since 7/1/08 (including our checking accounts, so this fluctuates as bills are paid and whatnot). Overall liabilities went down by 2% (from $44,584.52 to $43,909.54). This makes our current net worth -$31,634.57.

• Savings consist of Emergency Fund with $1,505.34 in HSBC and $25 in ING. Our Christmas Fund account has $40 in it. Miscellaneous Savings has $55 (this is for our annual renewal of Xbox Live and renewal on website domains/hosting paid annually). Auto Savings has $240 in it (although we need some work done soon - transmission service and fuel treatment service). The Car Insurance Savings has $560, which is over half of what we need by October to pay our 6 month premium.