Checking in for week 1 of Carlas January Challenge! No photos though as I’ve been pretty much confined to lounge again with my feet up for the week, just doing the minimum.
My decluttering challenge for the month is my filing cabinet. I’ve started sorting and have desk covered with bills and paperwork that I’m sorting though. one pile at a time. I’ve cleaned out my old budgeting folder and set up the new one for 2013.
My financial challenge is to meet my Grocery Challenge budget this month. I’m over it this week as I carefully did my shopping list counting on using one of gift cards from the survey sites. Well when I got there I had taken one for a different store! LOL! Luckily i still have three weeks to go to balance it up.
Now the week one challenges were to – find a way to ‘make do’ that saves you money. Well mine is slightly different – I read a great post ” I’m going Bananas” over at Let’s Get Fiscal and instead of throwing out my bananas and strawberries that were going soft I pureed them all and froze them. An easy simple idea that has saved me money on fruit for smoothies! Thanks for the idea T.Leah 
The other Week 1 Challenge was; ‘what clutters up your home most?” – now I’m tempted to say DH but in truth, most of our clutter now is the paperwork in the filing cabinets which I’m working on and the furniture thats been moved to other rooms so we can paint. Theres not really much left here to get rid of anymore. I need to keep the furniture until we sell the house, then a lot of it will be sold.
Nice work on the challenge! I also need to get to our filing cabinet. It’s a pit! We have paperwork in there from 15 years ago that we don’t need.
I started by decluttering my jewelry armoire – I have very little jewelry, so it’s been filled up with lots of other random junk. It’s now totally declutter! One thing down.
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Louise Reply:
January 7th, 2013 at 4:51 pm
I think paper multiplies inside those filing cabinets…
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Thanks for the shout out! I’m glad it helped you.
Good luck on the challenge. I think decluttering is an excellent idea because you get rid of useless stuff but also may find stuff that you can make use of (and maybe forgot that you had – happens to me all the time).
Have you ever sold stuff around your home that you are getting rid of? I have entertained the idea because financially smart, but couldn’t be bothered with weird people contacting me for my junk. I end up donating must things. What do you do?
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Louise Reply:
January 12th, 2013 at 11:17 am
I have sold my old books and some things on ebay, but it’s weighing up the cost of listing and posting them, or of having a garage sale. Unless I can get at least $10 for something I just donate it to charity. I did well with my books and all that money went to the mortgage.
Later I will sell some of our furniture when we are ready to move.
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My filing is just a giant pile waiting to be filed in the filing boxes. I am not sure if that project will be tackled until tax time when I have to sort it out.
I am attempting a No Spend challenge during January but fast food has been tempting me to overinduldge on my very tight budget.
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Hahaha… my kids produce the most clutter!
lol!! Good luck with the grocery budget… we spent more than anticipated as some great sales came up, but we’re still under budget, so i’m ok with that!!
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