Big Changes

Ah, where to start? Well, I'm pregnant! My husband and I are due to have our first child in August.

When I started this blog two years ago, I subtitled it "Preparing our finances for starting a family". Well, the family is on it's way, are the finances prepared?

I think we are about as financially ready as we can be for having children and becoming a one-income family. Our emergency fund is where we want it to be. We have a good-sized home improvement (repair) fund and enough in our car fund to buy a late-model used vehicle. We will also still be able to fund our retirement accounts, although we'll probably be putting in a little less than we are now. We even have two vacations planned (and money to pay for them) before the baby arrives!

I've always heard that if you wait for the "perfect" time to have kids, it will never happen. I can definitely see how that's true. There's a part of me that thinks, "I wish we had just a little more in our emergency fund, car fund, home improvement fund, etc." Overall, though, I think we're well prepared.

I say all of this to lead up to letting you know that I plan to stop writing on the Family and Finances blog. The bill for renewing the domain name is coming due, and this seems like the right time. I'm going to try to move the blog back over to blogger at familyandfinances.blogspot.com, but it may not work and I might lose everything! I do not plan to continue writing here, but if you are interested in keeping up with my personal life, you are welcome to follow along at my personal blog here.

Thanks for joining me in this two-year journey!

The Great Thing About Home Depot

Did you know that Home Depot takes competitor coupons? My husband and I found this out about a year ago and have saved hundreds of dollars over the course of the year. In fact, we saved $100 just the other night!

My husband has been wanting a table saw for quite some time, and has watched Craigslist for the right deal for months. He finally came to the conclusion that he wasn't going to find what he was looking for on Craigslist. He did some research and decided that he wanted a Ridgid table saw (Ridgid is only sold at Home Depot).

The table saw costs $500 on never goes on sale. There is occasionally a rebate available, though, plus we knew we could look for a competitor coupon.

Then, a few nights ago, my husband randomly decided to look through a AAA magazine we get. He noticed a Harbor Freight coupon for 20% off a single item with no dollar limit! I convinced him that it was time to get the table saw.

We had to borrow a pick-up truck and go to two Home Depots, but we came home last Friday night with a $500 Ridgid table saw for $400 (bought completely with Christmas and birthday money, yay!).



My husband couldn't wait to get it out of the box:
...and he's already gotten a lot of use out of it!

We use Tru-Value coupons all the time, as we get $2 off $10 and $5 off $25 coupons from them in our community mailers every month or so. The 2010 Entertainment Book for our area also had a 15% off Menards coupon and 10% and 15% off Harbor Freight coupons. Perfect for all of the home remodeling we've been doing!