Just wondering what everyone spends on groceries for the week? We have a 5 year old, 1 year old, 1 cat (that we include all of her food, litter, etc.) and then two adults we're paying for. Just noticing recently that we haven't been hitting my $125/week budget for a while now so I'm probably going to up it to at least $150.

Generally we eat out Friday night, Saturday night, and get a takeout meal on Sunday (which aren't included in the above amounts), but other meals are at home. Just thought it'd be interesting to see what everyone else spends.

My 5 year old loves the water but up until now she's been using floaties or those puddle jumpers in the water and has someone swimming next to her to watch her. I'm thinking it's time to get her some real instruction and based on how tentative she is I'm thinking she'll get a lot more out of private lessons then the group ones they have. Does anyone have any experience with sending their kids for lessons? If I was a better swimmer I would teach her myself but I only know how to stay afloat and keep myself alive in the water and I'm sure she would benefit from learning something more than doggie paddle from her mama!

Supposedly the cost is $35 for half hour of instruction. I'm going to call around and see if anyone will do it for something more reasonable then that.

So here's the deal...in order to get this house we ended up using a credit card. To acquire the house and then put on the new roof our balance soared to 17,350. Prior to buying this house we had no credit cards so it's been a real shock to say the least.

Since January we have paid the credit card down to 13,000 (approx. 500-100 per month plus the help of our tax refund). I'm hoping to have this down to 6,300 in January. The goal is to have it paid off in 2017 so we can look towards paying down the mortgages and doing some fix ups around the house.

I haven't updated much because there's so much that has gone on and in some ways I felt like a failure because we were better off financially before then we are now.

Baby girl #2 was born April 2015. Things were moving along ok with maternity leave and then part-time work and then when I wasn't even back to work full-time we found a piece of crud house near my parents house in a fantastic school district and we decided to make the jump. We kept our first home and have made it into a rental but now we have the other rental that we co-own with my parents and now the new house's mortgage.

In many ways this house is a step down for us. Smaller, in need of a lot of renovation, etc. BUT it is in a fantastic school district and my mom will be able to help out a lot (instead of being forced to spend on before/after care). Where we were before we were forced to go the private school route plus the before/after care costs..it would've been outrageous to pay for two kids.

So here we are, more in debt between the mortgages and a 0% credit card that we used to secure this new house (and the new roof we were forced into doing to secure homeowners insurance).

But I have a PLAN! My spreadsheet is updated and we are putting 500-1000 per month on the 0% card. At one point it was 17,350 but we have it down to 13k now. Once the girly gets to kindergarten in the fall we will have a bit more money to play around with. We're making strides but it's a slow and steady pace instead of the big leaps we were making previously. Just gotta be patient...