Getting to 60% Part 2: More Details

Husband here, chiming in with a more detailed picture of our progress toward 60%.

We used “creative accounting” to get down to 79% from something crazy like 89%. Nothing fancy, just moving newspaper subscriptions and Netflix into the fun category, and moving the car payment and home equity loan into the debt/savings category.

Grandma (my mother-in-law) graciously offered to help with the kids two days a week, so we reduced the sitter’s hours accordingly and cut our childcare costs from $248/week to $132/week. That is a gigantic difference.

Smarter grocery shopping is driving down our monthly food bill from upwards of $700 to more like $400. An additional benefit is that we are planning our menus more regularly, shopping weekly and eating together as a family nearly every evening.

And by exercising the barest smidgen of fiscal restraint, we are going to slash our monthly Target/Walgreens/Etc. bill from $250 to more like $80. (Related side note: I recently ran out of shaving cream. I meant to buy more at Target, but forgot, so I’ve been shaving without it for a couple weeks now… and haven’t noticed a difference. So that’s a few more dollars saved. Yet I would not have thought twice about buying more for the rest of my life if not for this project.)

Sara also did a very smart thing recently when the kids needed some new fall clothes. Instead of a Target splurge, she suggested we sell our treasure trove of too-small kids’ clothes. So we did. I had no idea how many boxes were lurking in the attic. Anyway, all of those got converted into cash and spent on new clothes and shoes… net cost $0.

We may not get to 60% before we reduce our debt load, but I am seeing positive effects on our cash flow already.