Upromise

This post is mostly for those who have school loans. If you've never heard of Upromise, you should sign up now! Upromise is a website that can link directly to your school loans. If you shop a lot online, a percentage of every purchase you make could be applied directly to your school loans for no extra charge. If you don't have school loans but know someone who does, you can also register as a "friend or family" to link up to another person's school loans. This is how it works:

• After you've set up an account and added whatever credit/debit cards you usually shop with, go to www.upromise.com
• Log in
• Search for the store where you are going to place an online order (there is a search bar at the top of the page)
• Upromise will then search for the store and show you what percentage you would get for making your online purchase (i.e. Vera Bradley is 5%)
• ***Click on the store website through your upromise webpage*** You only get credit for the purchases made directly through the site
• Shop for whatever you were already going to buy, check out like normal, and earn extra money!!

Within a few days, your money will be 'funded' to your account. You can track all of your purchases through the account information. I think in the few years that we've been doing upromise, we have funded almost $200.00 to loans. That isn't a huge amount compared to what we owe; however, we would have been making the online purchase anyway so we figured we should go ahead and get credit for it.

The biggest thing to remember is that you have to go through your upromise account before you go to the store website. I have forgotten that so many times and have lost out on money. I use upromise the most when I am booking a flight or hotel, buying a gift card, or shopping for random items. Amazon doesn't have a upromise percentage yet but Upromise does have HUNDREDS of stores available. You can look at the full list of store here.

Another perk to having Upromise is that you can earn money for groceries. You can plug in your various grocery savings cards (i.e. Food Lion MVP) and each time you use your card, you get a few pennies added to your account. When you want to cash in your money, you can either send it directly to your loans or request the money to come to you in a check.

We are all about finding more ways to pay down our debt. If you have school loans and you don't have upromise, sign up today! If you don't have school loans but want to help out, you can become my 'friend and family.' :) Happy Savings!

Goal update- 1 month down, 35 months to go!

In our first month of the three year challenge to be debt-free, we went from $68,303 to now $66,674!!  

The interest is so frustrating because we make a big payment but it doesn't look like it was as big because the interest grows daily! Now we have 35 months to go...and at this rate, we need to pay $1904.00 a month to meet our goal:) In a couple more months, we will have one large loan paid off and from then on, our monthly payment will be reduced with each loan we pay off, making that $1900 shrink and shrink (hopefully!!). I'm excited! Does anyone else get this excited about paying off debt? I'd like to know your plan to pay down debt!

Budget spreadsheet: A How-To

Let me start by saying that I am in no way taking credit for this spreadsheet! Luther came up with it a few years ago and I had no idea how he did it! I never was any good with Excel. Now that it is set up, all I have to do is enter the numbers! The way our spreadsheet works may not work for you and your family; however, I've had several questions on how to do the spreadsheet so here's my post:) I hope this post isn't too confusing but it is hard to describe the steps to take to make our spreadsheet. Here goes nothing!

As I mentioned in a previous post, we have our budget divided into categories. The first step to creating the budget spreadsheet is to divide your columns into your money categories. For example, our "A" and "B" column are both designated for food, "C" and "D" are both designated for gas. We use two columns for each section. The first column for each money category is for the name of the store or for what you purchased (i.e. Walmart, Wendys, Food Lion) and the second column is for the amount spent. We use all the columns through 'V' for our actual budget categories.

After we made our categories for all of our budget sections, we then made a column listing each section. The column directly beside our total budget column is the column where you input the formula.

After you set up the formula, every time you enter an amount into the appropriate column, it should automatically do the math for you in your 'totals' column. The number that is shown would reflect what you have left out of the money you budgeted for that category.

Making the formula:

Decide what you are budgeting for each money section. We budget $200 for gas each money. Our gas formula would then be:

=200-SUM(D2:D50)

After the =, put the total you are budgeting. That number minus the SUM of the cells D2-D50. We never use through the 50th cell in each column but we put that number in just in case.

Our "Transfer to Savings" section is just for us to know how much we were over or under for the entire month, in all categories combined. This shows us what we have to put into savings. If you want a similar column, the formula will be:

=TOTAL AMOUNT BUDGETED+SUM(Y2:Y12)

Your totals and columns will obviously vary from ours but this is how we track our monthly spending. Hopefully you will be able to apply this information towards your spreadsheets in a way that makes sense for you and your families.

Good luck and Happy Savings!