4 tried and true (by me) freezer recipes to help boost your budget

I’m a huge advocate for freezer meals because they help families avoid takeout or delivery on the days when they can’t even fathom making and cleaning from dinner.  We all have days like that.  Freezer meals help you avoid takeout or delivery meals and will keep all that money in your pockets!

Here are five freezer meals (from our rotation) that we have found worthy to continue making after the first attempt.  Rest assured that this isn’t just a compilation I found and thought I’d pass along; we actually make and eat these.  You can see photos on my instagram every once in awhile when we make them.

Let’s get right to it:

1. Chicken Pot Pie – This recipe is one of our favorites!  We prepare it both fully assembled and in a gallon freezer baggie depending on the room available in our freezer and if we have any premade pie crusts on hand at the time of the prep.
2. Chicken Noodle Soup – This is my husband’s favorite soup recipe!  What I love about this is that I’m able to make it with leftover ingredients from the chicken pot pies.  It is SO delicious.
3. Chicken Broccoli Rice Casserole – Such a simple recipe, yet so yummy.  I add additional salt when making and on my personal plate, whereas my husband likes to add seasoned salt or hot sauce.  This is one of the simplest freezer preps, too!
4. Pizza – Frozen pizzas never last in our house.  We eat pizza like there’s no tomorrow and often these are gone by the end of the week when we prep them.  They take up very little space in the freezer and the amount of money they save is worship worthy.

What is your favorite tried and true freezer meal?

Four tried and true make ahead meal recipes to add to your freezer meal stash. We really do make these and have them in our rotation! Yum!

Current Debt Summary

We had over $100,000 worth of debt when we realized how unnecessary carrying debt is.  We want to be the owners of the belongings we use and care for, not some random bank.

We keep track of our debt-milestones in many medias; excel spreadsheets, bullet journals, banking apps, and in notebooks scribbled when we randomly have a thought that has to do with the budget (it’s addicting).

Recently we’ve come up with a current total and here it is:

Personal loan –             $6,001.40
Revolving debt –           $7,106.54
Vehicle loans –            $21,923.56
Student loans –           $15,515.83
Total current debt –   $50,547.33

We are more than half way toward being debt free!  Isn’t that amazing?  We had well over 100k  in debt and we’ll be below 50k by the end of August.

Such an amazing milestone! *applause*

The last time we were in only (hear my sarcasm) $50,000 of debt was before we were engaged and we each had about 25k of debt, and that was in 2013!  How exciting is this?!

The snowball is picking up momentum.  The personal loan should be paid off easily by the end of 2017!

Let’s get this.

Debt snapshot as of August 10, 2017. We began our early 20’s with over 125k in debt, and we’re on a journey to be debt free by 30!

July Budget

Happy August, friends!  Today is the first Monday of the month so we’re going to review July’s accomplishments.

There weren’t many if we’re talking finances… We were able to overpay our debts as usual but by significantly less than we expect of ourselves.

July is always a crazy month for us, since we try to do something for Independence Day and Elizabeth’s birthday which always end up costing us extra.

Afterthought: we’ll have to create a sinking fund for Birthdays in the future.

We were, however, very fortunate in that the present we gave her was an electric MINI cooper we purchased when I was only 8 weeks pregnant with her.  It was the Saturday after Black Friday (2014) and the car was on sale for $25.  I would have purchased at least a couple but ironically only one would fit inside my MINI Cooper!

Back to the budget – we spent more money in every one of our budget categories due to our July lifestyle.

August is shaping up to be a significantly better month so far, though we are going on a vacation in a couple weeks.  Wish us luck, we’re already doing our best to prep for money saving measures while we’re away.