And Then She Saved

So recently I was following a link on CNN, which led to my usual browsing afterward and they featured a blogger named Anna Newell Jones of And Then She Saved. She is a young person, like myself, who works a decent job and is married, but still finds herself in debt from consumer credit cards and student loans. She spent a whole year on a self-imposed spending fast and she was able to pay down $17,000 of her debt. Incredible, right?

So over the next week or so I obsessively read all 70 something pages of her blog from the last year. A little much, I know. But I was so drawn into her story. After her first three months, I was read to do my own spending fast. Then I got my first paycheck of the year, and realized I already put the majority of my salary toward debt payment, so how in the world was I going to save money?

Well, there are a few things that really stood out for me from her blog that I will most likely consider using and doing without actually doing a complete and total spending fast. Here are the elements I am most likely to try:

• Cut down on eating out. This one fits in especially well with my next plan - losing weight!
• When grocery shopping, buy store brands - there is almost never, if any, difference between these and the fancy brands
• When planning meals, plan around items I already have in the pantry.
  
• Spend less on cleaning supplies - I realized at the store the other day that I would have spent nearly $9 on those Swiffer duster refill things. Obviously, that is too damn much money to spend on something that I am just going to throw away. So instead I bought a can of hypoallergenic dusting stuff that was $5 and will last me much longer. In the future I plan to investigate homemade cleaners for laundry, etc.
• Cutting down on costs like cell phone. I have a Blackberry with the Internet, but I am at a computer all day for work, so why should I pay for Internet on my phone? I have started to look into this, but it is apparently more complicated than I thought it would be. More on that later.

So that's just a start on some things I would like to try from And Then She Saved. Only time will tell how they will pan out for me!