Over the past 6 months, Josh and I have been practicing living on a shoestring budget so we can build up our emergency fund savings account.

It’s not easy.

Or all that much fun.

And in fact, it’s pretty dang difficult most of the time.

But it’s working, and our savings account is ticking up and up slowly but steadily.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to find this book at the library. The title  – Shattering the Two Income Myth: Daily Secrets for Living Well on One Income – it sounded super intriguing. Like it might be a great complement to all the budgeting practice we’ve been getting thanks to the Dave Ramsey class we took at church last fall.

Shattering the Two Income Myth by Andy Dappen is a great book if you’re interested in taking baby steps to slowly start working your home to bring those monthly bills down. It’s got a daily calendar format I really liked. If you owned the book instead of borrowing from the library, you could pick one little task each day to work your way towards better money management. It also has a pretty deep discussion in the beginning about how our society has developed into one where most families have both parents working, and some less than savory outcomes that may be linked.

I am deeply grateful I get to be home and mom it up with my kids while working as a freelance illustrator; I firmly believe these two hooligans are as amazing as they are because they’ve got a parent at home. No judgement on those of you who work outside the home at all. I’m underlining that. But for us, me working from home is a choice we made 6 years ago and I feel like it’s made all the difference.

But back to those budget tips.

I think the biggest a-ha moment I had while I was reading this was the section on grocery shopping. Thanks to our weekly budget, Josh and I are already fully on board with the meal planning party train.

But when this book mentioned looking at the sales sections of the grocery stores I shop at first and planning our meals based on sale items from the store circulars… 

I’m an idiot for not ever doing it that way before, guys.

I mean seriously.

The book’s chock full of solid gold nuggets like that. So much so that I took notes, and typed up my own list of over 100 things our family is going to work on thanks to this book.

Are you on a shoestring budget, too?

If you’d like to see my list I’m happy to share! Just hop on over to the contact page and shoot me a quick note.

Click here to pick up your copy of Shattering the Two Income Myth.