Couponing to Stay Home Full-Time

Ok, so this is my first post on my new blog. No promises that I will be able to keep this up regularly, but I am going to try this out...

So, here is my story... a little over a year ago, I had my beautiful daughter Olivia! Even though I had a really good job, after having her, I had a hard time with leaving her in daycare and going back to work. In order to not make any rash decisions that I would possibly later regret, we decided that I would go back part-time and give it 6 months to see if I wanted to keep working or stay home full-time. After 6 months of working 3 days a week and being home with Olivia for the other 4, I decided I wanted to be home with her everyday!! However, in order to do that, we had to take a big cut in income. That part was hard, but we sat down and looked at the numbers and realized it was possible. It just meant that we had to tighten our spending belts a little. One of the big things I did was to start couponing. I don't mean just cutting coupons out of the Sunday paper and using a few here and there. I mean REALLY watching sales and matching coupons to the sale and only buying things at the lowest point possible! All of this while not giving up the health of our family (mainly our daughter who gets $4.00 per half gallon Organic Milk and organic yogurt everyday)!!


I have been really couponing for the past few months, and so far, I have made budget every month and we have a lot more supply at the end of the month, i.e. plenty of paper towels, toothpaste, shampoo, deodarant, and items in the pantry and freezer. However, at the end of every month, we still exhaust all of the money we have set aside for groceries and feel broke. So, that brings us to now, I have decided to take on the "All You" Grocery challenge. It is a 4 week challenge where you can only spend $25 per person per week for groceries, so that is $75 for my household. I plan to journal my efforts on this blog, and hopefully, once the challenge is over, continue to meet this new budget. That way we won't feel so broke at the end of every month, we will have a little bit of money to do things we want, and then we will have some money to save towards the many big items we need (new siding on the house and a new car in the next year or two). Hopefully through my efforts I will also be able to save some family and friends money also!