So.  Last night I had a wonderful conversation with my sister.  While I was talking, I was outside doing a little physical work (knocking dead branches out of our dogwoods — another story), so I was sweating a little.  When we were done, I hung up, wiped the phone off (ew) and went back to work.  Last night, when I went to set my alarm on my phone and plug it in for the night, I discovered that my phone no longer responds to touch (it’s an iPhone).  This, I decided quickly, is a problem.

We did everything we could think of to no avail and then pondered our doom in bed.  How could this huge expense come up right when we starting making decisions to save money in other areas of our life?  If we upgrade to the 3GS iPhone, it’ll use up 3-4 weeks in grocery savings that we think we can do.  We need to save money, not spend it!  And as we were laying there, it came out:  maybe we don’t need an iPhone.

silence.

We both use our iPhones a lot for many things everyday.  To drop the iPhone and go back to *gulp* normal cellphones that don’t have all those wonderful applications, might mean that we’d have to… well… use the computer instead.  Or get the directions ahead of time.  Or only check our email once a day.  Or entertain ourselves through reading.  Or talk to each other.  Or to our friends.  Or neighbors.

Wait.  How much would we save monthly if we didn’t have two smart phone plans?

Seventy dollars.  A month.  That’s a lot of diapers.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to announce that Mr. and Mrs. Elliott (2 ts) are now former smart phone owners.  We went out today and replaced both phones and already have an offer on Rebecca’s 3G.  (My phone is, sadly, just a bulky, pretty clock that has to be charged every night.)

It would be nice to get back into smart phones at some point. But the moral of the story is that we found a way to turn an unexpected expense into a money-saving venture.

Hope we can find more of those!

-Adam

…She said today in our new Bradley method childbirth class.  She was talking about forming habits of nutrition and exercise and relaxation in preparing for Gabriel’s first public appearance this September, but the idea has been carrying over in our minds today as we started think about ways to cut our spending.

Our plan is to put the money that I’m making as a teacher this summer into savings and then depend on my salary and savings to cover our budget from Birthday until the end of the year.  This was all well and good until the AC unit went out and the warranty company says they won’t cover the repair/replacement.  But that’s another story.  The point is that already we are finding unexpected expenses trying to thwart our well-thought-out financial plan.  So, we still need to be on the look out for things we can sell, things we don’t need to buy and things we can buy cheaper.

One major way that we intend to try to save money and eat healthier at the same time is to be more intentional with our grocery budget.  We hope to radically change the way we eat by giving us a more healthy and consistent diet of food cooked at home with as little preservatives and additives as possible.  This will require baby steps, but we hope to map it out on here.  Rebecca will be largely in charge of showing what we are doing to save financially (she’s the budget queen around the house) and we’ll both be describing our baby-step easy recipes to start moving toward cooking at home more often and what tastes good.

Our plan is to keep this updated at least weekly over the next 12 weeks.  Please be patient if we have a hard time being consistent… after all, it takes 12 weeks to form a habit.

-Adam