Money matters

I've been thinking about money a lot lately.  Phil and I have a pretty tight budget and have been lucky enough to be able to put money in our savings and in our Roth IRA's over the past year and a half (we aren't counting on Social Security when we retire).  However, to our surprise, I found out a couple of weeks ago that I would NOT be receiving a grant this summer for school.  They used to allow students to receive grants year round (fall, spring and summer semesters; I got a grant last summer) but as of this year that has all changed.  So instead of having over half of my tuition paid for, we have to pay for it all out of pocket.  The thing that makes it even more frustrating is that I could have really graduated in May instead of stretching it out and taking some classes this summer before finishing.  The reason I did that was because I thought I was going to get the grant, so instead of doing two semesters of 18 credits each and getting $5100 in grants, the plan was to take three semesters of 12 credits each and get $7650 in grants.  Same amount of classes, more grant money, less money out of pocket.  We thought we had a great plan.  Too bad the U doesn't inform its students when they suddenly decide to take summer grant money away. 

Phil reminded me that at least we have the money to pay for my tuition this semester and we don't have to get loans or anything.  He's right, and I'm grateful for that, but sad for the dent that it puts in our carefully saved nest egg. Not to mention that I'm a little nervous about how it will be when we move because I will be the full-time bread winner instead of Phil while he is going to school.  Thunderbird is, to say the least, very expensive. We will have to get loans to pay for all of Phil's tuition, but I refuse to use any loan money for general living expenses, so I have to find a job that will at least pay for the necessities.

So, lately I have been listening to the Dave Ramsey Show; if you haven't heard of him he is the author of The Total Money Makeover, a book we received when we were married and that offers, truly, great advice on money management.  One thing Dave talks about is having "gazelle-like intensity" when working to pay off debt, and "live like no one else, so you can live like no one else".  The idea behind that is of course that we should save our money like crazy and avoid debt at all costs until we are completely debt free and wealthy and then we can do whatever we want with our money and have a great time. Unfortunately that requires not spending money on frivolous things like going out to dinner, going on vacation, buying anything we don't need, etc. With all this in mind, I have been thinking of any way we might be able to save more money, starting with cuts on our grocery list to make it less expensive.  Yesterday I started looking up bean and rice recipes that we can live on instead of eating meat or a lot of produce.  I even started thinking about making cloth napkins so that we wouldn't spend money buying regular paper napkins... So, I may be getting a little extreme, but I really do want to cut down on expenses and hopefully we can.  Beans and rice here we come!