Yipes, haven't blogged for a week, though I have been staying caught up reading everyone else's blogs. Not much has been going on...I guess when you're trying to be really tight with money, you don't spend so much so there's not much to write about.

I paid my bills on the 15th. Looking forward to the end of the month, it looks like I'll be a little worse than last month, but still ok. We had a few unanticipated expenses that cropped up, including a big hit for DH's life insurance, as we were a few months behind on the premium due to his job change (the premiums are no longer coming out of his check). Ouch.

And I'll admit it, the real culprit is Facebook. I finally signed up last week and it's more addictive than I thought it would be. It's pretty fun catching up with some old friends, but I don't know what will come of it. I do know I can't spend hours a day on it! lol.

I'm also keeping tabs on my dad, from a distance. He's 84 and seems like he's doing a bit worse over the last few months. I'm an hour away, so it's hard. I need to get down to see him a little more frequently.

So a lot going on, but not much financial.

Wow, did my grocery budget take a hit yesterday. It was already high from the previous week, when we had guests for dinner. On Friday, I was all set with a pretty modest list taking advantage of great sales prices. But it went to pot (shout out to Michael Phelps!) ON Saturday.

First, DD asked if she could go with me. She's in that pre-teen stage where she doesn't know if she wants to hang out with me or be all independent, so if she asks to spend time together, I usually try to accomodate. We had to wait for hubby to come home before we went out. I'm not quite sure why, but it was a bit hectic and I left without my list. I remembered the big sale things I needed, and the other staples on the list, but I ended up with about $25 worth of stuff that I didn't anticipate buying. Then to add salt to the wounds, I actually had coupons for about half of the extras I bought, but could only find about 1/2 of them in my envelopes while we were waiting to check out. Ugh...

I need to update my grocery log...I have to enter the last 2 weeks and I don't want to get too far behind because it's so tedious. I also have 2 rebates to fill out and send in. I should be able to get to that tonight or tomorrow.

Now that I'm paying more attention to my receipts than usual, I've noticed something: many times at the bottom of the receipt, a company will list a 1-800 number and request that you complete a survey about your experience. Often, they'll throw in a freebie. Here are the 3 recent ones I got:

Children's Place - 10% off my next purchase
Burger King - Free Whopper
Dunkin Donuts - Free small coffee.

Now, I'm sure many of you are thinking "what are you doing going to Burger King/Dunkin Donuts in the first place?!", but that's not the point. If you ARE there, you may as well get something extra out of it. The surveys are painless and usually take only a few minutes.

We completed our first month on 1 fixed income and ended up only $47.05 short! This is tremendous, because we gave up about 60% of our fixed income when DH left his job to start up his own company. We cut down on our savings, cut out some unnecessary expenses and basically just watched things a little more closely, but at the same time, didn't really feel like we were sacrificing that much. So we're happy about that. We have a few big hits coming up in February which will make it a little worse, but as long as we're within about $500 or so, we can cover that with hubby's earnings.

Here are some highlights:
Groceries - came in at $493.53 when the budget is $500.
Gas for the car - $169.58 with a $200 budget. This was betweem $400 and $500 last summer when we were driving every day and gas prices were through the roof.
We were definitely helped out by some refunds, rebates and other credits that came in as well.

Over the next few days I'll project February and see where the rough patches will be. We spent some money yesterday for guests we had over for dinner. I'm breaking out the stuff that was for dinner into the "Entertainment" category so I don't blow my grocery budget day 1.

I have a few more receipts to enter into my flexible spending account. I finally got my crown taken care of last week. While I was there, he saw that another filling cracked, taking 1/2 the tooth with it, so I'll need a crown (no root canal) on that tooth. I set up an appointment in a few weeks.

I also have one more rebate to fill out.

That's about it. Other than that we'ree just hanging out at home getting ready for the SuperBowl.