Hubby came home late from a trip last night. Instead of ordering out, as we'd normally do, he suggested that we make the frozen ravioli we had. I figure we saved $20-$25. Not bad. A big key for us is keeping food like that around that we enjoy eating and can get right out of the freezer.

I went to the Wendy's website. It says that they will still honor paper gift certificates indefinitely, so maybe I just hit a franchise that didn't want to be bothered. I'll try them at the one closer to my house and see if I have better luck. If they don't take them, I'll call customer service about exchanging them for a gift card. At least I won't lose their value, which is cool.

Back on MyPoints. I have a balance of 1885 points, which can actually get me a $10 gc somewhere. I'll hold off and get more and get one when we get closer to the holidays. Also cancelled my Weight Watchers membership. I'm paid through the 16th, so I can always go on before then to get whatever info I need.

I went to the Today Show website and checked out that piece on what percentage of your income should go to different things. They must have been talking net pay, because they said it should break down like this: Housing (30%), Transportation (18%), Debt (10%), Savings (10%), Food (14%), Utilities (7%), and Other (11%). There's no way we're keeping to 11% for other, especially if you include taxes and health insurance, which come out of our gross pay.

So I checked out what our percentages are (gross), and they break out like this:
Housing: 16.14% (mort, insurance, prop tax)
Auto: 8.82% (car pmt, insurance, maint, gas, pkg)
Debt: 0.69% (Payments on HELOC)
Food: 3.43% (groceries, eating out, food @ work)
Savings: 16.91% (401k, 529s, whatever's leftover)
Utilities: 4.35% (gas, elec, phone, cell, internet, cable)
Taxes: 30.53% (fed, state, fica)
Insurance: 2.35% (health & life)
Other: 16.77% (everything else)

I think utilities, food and other are the 3 big categories for me to focus on. My goal is to be able to live on one salary, which would put a lot of these categories out of whack.