I have been challenging the limits of our budget lately, wondering… what else can we cut back on? What else is there left to not spend money on? It’s got me thinking about things… as I stare at the excel spreadsheet that is our budget, I see very little waste. As an engineer I would say that I have officially leaned out that process. But anyone who knows anything about lean, knows that if you step back and look again later you will see things differently again.

My point is that this is truly a journey. There are three fundamentals to our core success in getting out of debt.

• The first is the income. I can’t do a whole lot about my income other than do my best at work and be happy to have a job in these economic times. Wifey and I do all that we can to do extra surveys, trials and money making things like selling on eBay and cash4books and stuff. Since I can’t change my income from my job, this helps supplement things.
• The second is debt. I can’t do a whole lot about our debt other than put every penny we can towards it and follow the debt snowball and pay the suckers off. We have made tremendous progress on this so far, but again, I can’t really change this.
• The third is expenses. This has been the area of the largest focus on our part thus far. We have cut out everything we can think of, dropped services, gone to bare bones plans, changed providers, you name it. I think we are about as cheap as we can be right now. At first it seems like there isn’t much more we can do here, but looks can be deceiving.

So that gets me thinking about frugality again. I have come up with all kinds of great frugal solutions to things around the house to save money and also keep from having to buy things (such as home made alternatives or freebies). I have also done wonders to our grocery budget with bulk cooking and frugal planning. I keep trying to think of new ways to save money or do things cheaper… but for some reason lately I have been coming up empty.

I can’t help but feel like I have hit a frugal wall, even just temporarily. I need inspiration… I need some great frugal motivational tips… So with that said…