I will talk about this more in an upcoming podcast in a few weeks. But I wanted to also talk about in my blog.

5 weeks ago my wife and I had realized that we went to walmart way too much. We had taken a look at our past months bank statement and realized that we had gotten off of our budget big time. During the prior month we had gone to Walmart 15 times. How in the world it happened is beyond me.

I also think that there is some sort of law that you cant go to Walmart without buying a bunch of crap that you don’t need. That seems to be what happened to us. We spend a few hundred dollars over our budget. So as of August 19th we decided to see how things would go if we never went to Walmart for the remainder of August and all of September. So far it has actually been really easy. Even though the grocery stores that we shop at now tend to be a little higher in prices than Walmart we are still saving money because we are not tempted to buy a bunch of unneeded crap.

If you have problems with overspending when you go to Walmart or Target or any other store then I suggest that you try cutting it out for a month and see how things go. My guess is that it will go better for you.

Back at the end of December 2011 I won $10,000 from Dave Ramsey. It was a very exciting time for myself and my wife. I had never won anything before. You always hear stories of lottery winners that are broke a few years after winning millions of dollars. Now I know $10,000 is a far cry from millions but it can have the same effect if you are not careful with your money. When I found out that I won I knew exactly what I was going to do with the money. We had about $4,000 left in debt to pay off. And the very day that check showed up in the mail that is exactly what I did.

Now 9 months later we are still debt free and have emergency money in the bank.

This money could of very easily gotten away from us and gotten spent on any number of stupid things. But instead we had a plan that we stuck to.