As we welcome the New Year, I thought it would be a good time reflect on my top 6 posts that have been viewed, liked, shared and commented on the most in 2016!

Thank you to everyone who has visited my blog, subscribed to my Newsletter, liked my page on Facebook and followed me on Twitter in the past year. I look forward to interacting with you even more in 2017.

For now, here are my top 6 posts in 2016!

1. Make Sushi at Home: It’s Much Cheaper

If you’re a fan of sushi but not quite the fan of paying for sushi takeaways, which can be a bit heavy on your budget, then this is the post for you! Watch my video tutorial and learn how to make sushi at home. The ingredients you need are affordable and all it takes is a couple of fun (and messy!) practice sessions until you get the hang of it! But when you do, I promise you’re going to enjoy making sushi and afterwards savouring the delicious taste of homemade sushi on a budget! Read the post here…

2. How We Reduced Our Monthly Expenditure

‘Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.’ – Benjamin Franklin

In order to find “extra” money in our budget, we had to reduce our monthly expenditure. We wrote down all our expenses on a piece of paper so that we could see very clearly how much we spent, where, when and on what exactly. Once we had these figures on paper, it was easy to see how much was too much and where the leaks in our wallets were! We then had a better idea of which leaking tap we needed to tighten or close for good. In this post I share with you how we fixed those expenditure leaks so that we could find “extra” money in our budget. Read the post here…

3. Homemade vs. Store-Bought

Have you ever wondered whether it would be cheaper to buy something or to make it at home? I know I have. In fact, it’s something that’s almost always on my mind. I love to do things at home – to cook, bake, sew, crochet and I enjoy all sorts of DIY projects. So I always have to ask myself whether it would be cheaper to buy something or to make it at home. Let’s look at the pros and cons. Read the post here…

4. Becoming Credit Card Free: Our Journey

Proverbs 22:7 ‘The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is a slave to the lender.’

Becoming credit card free and living life more frugally hasn’t been an easy journey for us. But the option of living life as borrowers, ‘servants to the lender’ and to credit card debt certainly didn’t feel that great for us either. This post details the beginning of our journey to becoming credit card free and living live more frugally and more economically. Our journey inspired me to start my blog. Read the post here…

5. Stick to Your Grocery Budget

South Africans spend, on average, 12,8% of their income on food and beverages per month, making this one of the top 3 expenditures in South African households along with transport and housing. We used to spend roughly the same amount of our income on food, and sometimes even more than that, if truth be told. We now spend about 10% of our income on food and beverages each month, and in this amount I also include all the food and treats for our 4 doggies as well as all our household cleaning items and our toiletries. And we pretty much stick to our grocery budget each month. This post tells you how we do that. Read the post here…

6. How to Save Money Grocery Shopping

Statistics show that food is the 3^rd highest household expenditure, after housing and transport, in South Africa. As I do most of the grocery shopping in our household I pay attention to the prices and it seems to me that each time I go to the shops something else has just gone up again. I try my best to be as frugal and careful as I can be when it comes to grocery shopping and here’s how I save money on our monthly grocery shopping. Read the post here…

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these top 6 posts and thank you again for your support in 2016! I wish you all a very Happy New Year.

If you’d like to stay in touch in 2017, and beyond, consider subscribing to my Newsletter to receive an email when I publish new blog posts or like my page Frugal in SA on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. I look forward to staying in touch and hearing from you, my lovely readers.

Happy Frugal Living in 2017!

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I haven’t done an update on our credit-card debt free journey in quite a while. It’s been nearly 3 years since we first started our journey to becoming credit-card debt free and we paid off our first credit card debt in November 2014. We are now almost completely debt-free on the second credit card debt which was much, much higher and as a result, much, much more difficult to pay off. Yet, here we are now, two more months, or two more payments, away from credit-card debt freedom so we are nearly there! This is the final stretch!

The reason I’ve been a bit quiet about this on my blog is because I think we’d probably hit the debt-payment plateau over the last few months, financially as well as emotionally. We’d reached our maximum stretch. We’d cut down as much as we could and wherever we could (read more about How we reduced our monthly expenditure and 10 ways we save money everyday). There was nothing more to cut down on so that we could find extra room in our budget for additional payments. We made the same, steady, monotonous extra payments each and every month.

We were working as much as we could and there were literally no more extra hours left in the day, Monday to Friday, or the weekends, for us to earn extra money. While we haven’t lost heart, and we are still as focussed as we can be, we’d just flat-lined a bit. Now that we are two more months, or two more payments, away from credit-card debt freedom, it feels a bit surreal. I almost didn’t even want to write a blog post about it in case… well, in case, something went wrong.

Can we relax a bit now? I think so. There are going to be no more crazy working hours and working over the weekends, at least not for a while and certainly not for me. Working non-stop is not fun, especially when it carries on for a bit longer than what your body can take. I’ve been walking around exhausted for months now, and this has affected my health and general well-being. This month, for example, I got my second bout of flu in less than 3 weeks and the second time round I was literally ordered to stay in bed for several days (which I did) so that I can recover completely and get some of my energy back.

But despite hitting the debt payoff plateau, so to speak, we still made the same additional payments every month for the last few months and it’s now down to just two more of those payments, and at this point, it doesn’t even matter that we cannot increase those extra payments. What matters, and what sounds awfully good as I say it to myself, is that those two extra payments will get paid. Saying that to myself, I actually feel lighter. Happier. Less burdened. Freer. Not yet completely free but freer. I even sleep better, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that.

So what’s next for us? The first step I’m looking forward to is seeing a ZERO balance on the second credit card very, very soon. The second step I’m looking forward to even more is closing that account for good. And after that? All I can say is – stay tuned, frugal friends…!

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Our very first credit card was paid off in full and the account closed in November 2014 (you can read more about our journey here). This was a small victory for us but a victory nonetheless! We just couldn’t be happier. We celebrated the day we closed that account and immediately started talking about paying off the balance on our second credit card. The balance we had remaining on that card, although high, was not very high and we felt that, with regular extra payments each month, no matter how small, we would soon be rid of that debt too.

Fast forward to the first half of 2015 and things were not looking good for us. Due to unexpected medical expenses as well as business-related expenses, the balance on the credit card had tripled; just ballooned, almost over-night it seemed. To make matters worse, there was no wiggle room in our budget during that time, and this would continue well into the year due to recurring medical expenses as well as business-related expenses each and every month. Eventually, we were exhausted – physically, mentally, emotionally and financially. Last year was a tough year for us. Although I don’t quite remember when we’d hit rock-bottom, all I know is that we did. And that lowest point was our turning point once again, as clichéd as that may sound. We realised that we had to get up and get moving in the right direction once again.

Fast forward another couple of months, and we’d tightened our already tight budget even more so that we could get back on track with extra credit card payments each month – whatever we could, whenever we could. We spent very little over the holidays simply because there just wasn’t much to spend. It was an all-round tough year. Yet we still managed to buy nice and thoughtful Christmas presents for all our loved ones, host a lovely Christmas lunch for a few family members and enjoy our time off, despite everything (read about Christmas and New Year frugal ideas here). We got through the two toughest months of the year – December and January – without incurring any additional debt for any of our household expenses. We usually budget for these two months very carefully so we don’t normally experience shortfalls but considering what a year we’d had, I was wondering if we’d make it. And we did.

We carried on budgeting, crunching numbers day in, day out, tightening up on whatever we could (read about how we saved on our monthly expenses here). Additionally, we made a decision to go through stuff that we have around the house and sell – an extra this, an extra that but generally items that we don’t really use often, or don’t use at all, or just don’t like or have outgrown, etc. This took us a while and I remember, at the time, a well-meaning friend asked me why I was even bothering to sell anything because I “wasn’t going to get much anyway so I might as well keep it”. While it may be true that we tend to pay a lot for brand new things sometimes only to end up selling them a year or two later for half the price, or even less than that, I realised that I was looking at the whole situation differently. The item has been paid for already, that money is gone, but I can certainly think about selling the item and getting some new money to put towards extra credit card payments. Every little Rand I got, and could put towards the credit card debt, meant that we wouldn’t be paying 18% or 20% interest on each one of those Rands.

So if this is something you are thinking about doing, then I can tell you with certainty that those Rands do add up and they do make a difference. It will take a bit of effort and thought and planning, not only going through your things and deciding what to sell, but also selling those items. We’ve pretty much done it all: we’ve sold privately, we’ve used Facebook groups, we’ve taken items to Pawn Shops (several of them, actually), we’ve taken stuff to flea markets, we’ve sold to Cash Converters. It all works. If one shop doesn’t want your items, try another one, or two, and someone will eventually take those items off your hands. It really is as they say: one’s man trash is another man’s treasure. And the items that you decide to sell don’t even have to be big ticket items – most of what we had were small things that we didn’t really need. The important thing is that the amounts you do get will add up to a nice chunk of change which you can then apply towards your extra credit card payments straightaway.

In addition to this, I’ve also started doing some extra (paid) work over the weekends. This is not always available through my workplace but on the few occasions that it was offered to employees, I volunteered. It is, after all, a bit of extra money at the end of the month and every bit helps as we can always use that extra money to put towards repaying our credit card debt. While we are not out of the woods just yet, the amount we owe on the second credit card has reduced. It is now half the amount it was when we started paying down the balance. Woohoo! Just saying this fills me with absolute joy. While we still have a good few months ahead of us, the progress we are making keeps us motivated to pay off our credit card debt. I cannot wait to fast forward over the next couple of months.

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Proverbs 22:7 ‘The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is a slave to the lender.’

Becoming credit card free and living life more frugally hasn’t been an easy journey for us. But the option of living life as borrowers, ‘servants to the lender’ and to credit card debt, can’t feel that great either, right? It certainly didn’t feel that great for us. Despite the hardships we faced, we have learnt so much from our mistakes over the last few years and I feel it in my heart that we have become stronger in faith and in character.

We got our first credit card years ago out of absolute ignorance, as unbelievable as that sounds. And yes, we did use it. We also got a second card a few months later. Why? Well, we didn’t apply for the second card: it was offered to us and we accepted it. We knew that interest would accrue on the balances owed but we had no idea how much or how long it would actually take to pay off balances on credit cards by paying the minimum balance each month. We never really bothered to look at the statements much and we continued to rely on the card for emergencies.

At the time, the car we had was really not the most reliable one. It was old and not in the best of shape at all. It pretty much needed spare parts, repairs and towing almost every single month. This was a huge drain on our finances, which we didn’t have. Yes, we owned the car but it was draining us financially every couple of weeks. As a result of that, we didn’t have enough money for a lot of other necessities so we had to resort to using the credit cards, oblivious to the horrendous amount of interest we would be paying with just the minimum repayments at the end of each month. By the time we managed to sell that car, and buy something a bit more reliable, but still second hand, we had credit card debt which we had to face.

We carried on paying the minimum balances each month, all the while thinking very naively that paying the minimum due each month would pretty soon make a dent in the balances we owed. After about 14 months or so, we got an absolute fright when we realised that after all those months of paying and paying, the remaining balance had hardly gone down! In fact, what had gone down was so small that it was laughable! We were horrified. In hindsight, we really were too young and so very naïve. Yes, we should have checked the statements more often and yes, we should have asked around for advice or at least read up a bit about it online. That moment was a real wake up call for us. Experience really is the best teacher, as they say.

And that’s when we started learning a bit more about how credit cards really work. We used an online debt repayment calculator, only to find out to our horror that paying the minimum balance on the one credit card meant that it would have taken us something like 8 years to pay off the total amount, with just about double the amount in interest alone. The second credit card would have taken a lot longer than that; in fact, so much longer that even now when I think about it, I shudder at the thought – 18 years.

It was then that we began to educate ourselves. We read lots of blogs with people’s personal experiences, watched a whole lot of videos online, read up on what financial experts had to say about saving money as well as getting out of debt. It took us a long time to see our situation for what it was. Both my husband and I really liked what Dave Ramsey had to say about the 7 Baby Steps to getting out of debt.

NOTE: I am not affiliated to Dave Ramsey or his products in any way. This blog post simply recounts the details of our personal journey to becoming credit-card free and is not intended to replace Dave Ramsey’s financial coaching or products or courses offered by the Financial Peace University in any way. You can read about Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps here and about Financial Peace University here.

So we thought we would give that a try. Moving on from step 1, which was setting up a very small emergency fund, we then started paying off the first credit card balance. We paid as much as we could over and above the minimum amount due at the end of the month. We scrimped and saved. We changed our shopping habits (you can read about how I save money on each month here and here. We sold pretty much whatever we had around the house that we weren’t really using. We also learnt, month by month, how to be more frugal in our lives and how to cut down on our monthly expenditure (read about how we did that in my post here).

All of this, and all at once, was a lot of hard work. It was exhausting. It was heart-wrenching at times. We lost hope and motivation so often along the way. Paying off credit card debt was HARD. But we wanted to be free. That was our goal. Large amounts owed on a credit card can be very daunting and the months ahead can seem very long. They certainly felt like that for us. But in spite of that, I can remember even now the biggest smiles on our faces each time we made an additional payment just so that we could check our balance and see the progress we were making! That’s what kept us going, I think (you can read more about how we stayed motivated while paying off credit card debt here).

We were absolutely overjoyed when we managed to pay off the full balance owed on the first credit card in just a year. I say ‘just’ a year because depending on how much debt a person has to deal with, it could take a lot longer than that. We closed that credit card account literally the day after the last payment went in. We just couldn’t wait a second longer to be rid of at least that one chain around our necks. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to express in words how elated we were that day! It’s certainly a day neither my husband nor I will forget. We were convinced we could even breathe easier from that moment on. It was a small victory but it was a victory for us nonetheless.

Looking back at our journey of paying off our very first credit card, I realise that it was a lesson well worth learning for us. We needed more discipline in certain aspects of our lives: discipline with finances in general, our spending habits, and learning how to be less wasteful with our resources. But, you might be wondering: whatever happened to the second credit card?

Becoming credit Card Free: Our Journey Part 2

For the time being, if you find yourself on a similar journey of paying off credit card debt in South Africa, I would love to connect with you so please leave me a comment below.

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