I have so much to say!

First of all, it's been a really long time. I'm going to try this whole blogging thing again. Now that I have two little boys at home with me, why not? Both of them are sleeping, one of them right next to me. For some reason I decided to write up this post rather then taking a nap myself. You'd think I'd be all over a nap since a. they are both asleep at the same time, b. Asher still wakes up several times a night and c. I am currently trying to potty train Judah and he is full of attitude! which is exhausting. But here I sit (lay) typing up this long overdue blog post.

Now that Jon has finished grad school in D.C. we have moved back to Seattle. The idea was to move in with our parents until Jon was able to land a job with either a NGO or The State Department which I didn't think would take long since Jon is such a genius and highly desirable (at least in my opinion). Which is why we left most of our belongings back in Maryland. Nine months later and still no job and still living with our parents (we started with mine and have now moved over to his, for a little variety). He is working, just not the higher paying job that utilizes his education, skills and experience like we had anticipated. We're very grateful that he is able to work and that we have such amazingly supportive parents because now we have his student loans to pay off, this should be fun. Anyway, in an effort to save as much money as possible to pay off our debt as soon as possible we have decided to try different ways to cut back. Here is a list of things that we are going to try:

*February No Spend Month- not spending any money at all, except for necessary things such as food or if we happen to run out of diapers or gas. Jon is taking the family car, with the car seats, to work to save on gas which also keeps me at home so I can't spend any money even if I wanted to.

*My cell phone contract with Verizon will be up on Feb 10 so I am going to cancel and switch from my iPhone to a pay as you go phone.

*Cook from scratch as much as I can. And start drinking green smoothies.

*Use coupons. I have started getting familiar with the local grocery stores online coupon deals as well as their ads.

*Prioritizing wants vs. needs.

Obviously we are saving tons of money by living with our parents and driving an old car (in case you didn't know we got rid of my Elantra and car payment). But Jon also drives my grandpa's old jeep, that is a huge gas hog, to work. So for at least this month he is driving our car as much as I can stand to not have a car and we'll see how it goes after this month.

I'm checking out lots of books from the library and downloading as many free ones from amazon for my kindle app on how to save money, get out of debt, and live cheaply. The only debt we have is the student loan so it's not like we need to change a lot of our spending habits but I would like to learn more efficient ways to be frugal as well as knowledgeable on how to save for our future. I get excited when I think about paying off our debt and saving for our future as well as someday buying a house, we just need to put in the effort now so we can reap the benefits later.