I’d also struggled with keeping a balance for Tim, who has ADD and was a spender when we met. He’s gotten a lot better, but he still gets restless when we stay in too many nights. He has a lot of things he wants, etc. I tried to make room for that, and sometimes went too far over to “spender” as a consequence.

Now that we’re on our own and it looks like my contract work is ending, we’re buckling down. Tim doesn’t love it but he’s trying hard to stay in line with it because I pretty much told him that I’m very nearly paralyzed with fear about what will happen once this work runs out. I don’t know if and when I’ll find work that I can do with my health problems.

So now, when we really don’t want to eat at home, we don’t call for a pizza. We suck it up and try to find something that we can stomach. We only ate out about once a week in general anyway, but we’re trying not to at all. Some weeks are better than others, but I think we’ve spent perhaps $50 total over the past month on meals out. Given that we used to spend $25-30/week, that’s pretty good for us. And that includes days where I was missing some of my medications, which makes it hard to cope with basic tasks, like cooking.

I don’t think it’ll be easy over the next 3-6 months, but it makes me feel safer that we’re trying to eradicate as much debt as possible. And that helps me to be more proactive (rather than frozen and freaked out and overwhelmed and just wanting someone to come to my door with food) about keeping frugal habits going.
Abigail´s last blog ..It’s the new math!