50/50 Week #4 Recap and Review

I can’t believe that the month is almost over!! I think we will be continuing this saving/earning for the remainder of the time I am out of work!!

I thought it would be much harder to cut back with my salary being gone (especially since I had the bigger salary in our house). A few simple things have allowed us to cut back big time!! Now onto the updates!!

As I pulled down the Christmas Decorations, I began to think of things I might need to add to the decor, or should I say the babies Christmas Decor. I managed to reuse a couple of things and decorate the entire baby’s room without spending any extra money. I re-used some blue lights that I didn’t use last year and made some unique decor for FREE!! I also agreed with my husband to forego any Christmas clearance decor come January!

1) So far, we are way under for our grocery budget for the month! That is a savings of about $150.

2) We also did so good budgeting our money this month, that despite not having an income for me, we were able to put $400 in our savings!!

3) Electric bill was down $10 as well (doesn’t seem like a lot, but when starting cloth diapers too, and doing laundry every day, this is pretty good)

4) Changed our TV plan to decrease by $10/month! Every little bit counts!!!

5) Haven’t been eating out nearly as much (especially the husband) savings of about $60 as compared to last month. Whenever we went out to eat, it was with a giftcard!

6) I was able to make an extra $400 this month by working a few hours here and there!

Total Savings thus far = $150 + $400 + $10 + $10 + $60 + $400 (earned) = $1030

Wow, I haven’t actually done out the numbers yet and my goal was $500!! This is impressive!! I am very psyched!!

Well, this 50/50 month has really flown by, but it has definitely gotten me going and will be something that I continue to pursue into 2012, so I thank you for the motivation.

Here’s an overview of my progress with the challenge:

As far as the earning more portion of the challenge, I was surprisingly able to sell 2 of my guitars just within the last week or two, so I’m happy about that.

I say surprisingly, because they weren’t the 2 guitars that I was looking to sell on Craigslist or eBay initially, but instead I ended up selling 2 other Gibson Les Pauls that I have via word of mouth. My friend actually does band and performance photography/video, so she was able to put the word out about my guitars for sale, and it resulted in some interest from local musicians.

So it’s definitely a good idea if you’re selling stuff to just get the word out there to anybody who might have connections. I’ve actually seen this work with some of my other friends as well, as I know a guy who sells mobile phones, and pretty much any time any of our friends or acquaintances needs a phone, we all know who to call or let people know about him, so the power of connections is huge in sales. I know you sometimes don’t want to be that person who is always promoting their business to people, but if you just bring up your business casually or mention, “Hey, I work at the car dealership,” it can result in some sales.

I won’t go into the details about these guitars as I have in the past, but I bought both of these Gibsons over the last year and was able to net a profit of about $450 for the both of them, considering I had them setup professionally with new strings, etc.

So I’m happy about that and think I could be somewhat successful with reselling guitars.

I will also mention that these sales were much easier, due to the connection between friends, whereas all of the Craigslist traffic I received really caused me some headaches and made me generally annoyed at people and their behavior. Not everybody of course, but enough people to make me question whether I wanted to deal with more Craigslist traffic. eBay would probably be better, because you don’t have as much of a personal connection, being it’s all done through the eBay system.

As far as the savings portion of my goal, I also did have some success.

My main goal was to cut back on eating out and getting take-out at local restaurants, and for the latter half of the month, I did really do well towards that end.

I had some issues earlier in the month, but I was really good about eating regularly at home leading up to Thanksgiving, and since then, I’ve been in leftover heaven, so I’m happy about that.

It’s hard to measure just how much I’ve saved, but since it’s easily possible for me to spend $100 a week splurging on restaurants and good deli food, I would probably estimate my savings at about $250, taking into account the increase in spending on groceries, etc.

I should say that I’m not a strong budgeter, so I don’t keep track of every penny that I spend, and therefore, I can’t say positively how much I might have saved, but I would say that $250 is a good estimate, as there was a good two and a half weeks at least that I didn’t eat out at all.

Just writing this now is making me want to order a pizza, but since it’s the last day of the challenge, I’m just going to go into my kitchen and cook some pasta and be happy about it.

So with the $450 in increased earnings and the $250 in savings, I have reached the $700 level.

However, my original goal was $1,000, so I did fall short of my goal.

I did actually just get another referral for my DIRECTV service yesterday, which is a savings of $10 per month for 10 months (or $100 in a year), but I’m not counting that towards my goal, since it wasn’t really a part of this challenge for me (although worthy of mention I think).

Either way, I guess I failed my goal, but I am happy with my progress and extremely happy that I got things going with selling some of my guitars that were purchased for that purpose.

I cannot thank you enough for providing the motivation for my successes and really appreciate you putting out this challenge.

Good luck to all of the other challengers as well.