Chapter One

Get a Grip on Your Spending

If you don't know how much money you spend or what you spend it on, you're not ready to hop off the two-income treadmill. You've got to know where your money goes if you want to start living on less without drowning in debt.

Sure, tracking expenditures is tedious, but I guarantee it'll pay off big. When I got a handle on my spending, I realized that my husband and I were together blowing about $45 a day in cash! That's more than it would cost us to eat out every night. What were we spending that money on? The list was long, so I'll name just three little indulgences that'll be familiar to many two-income couples. My lunches, because I was too busy every evening to even think about brown bagging it the next day. Taxi fares, so my husb ... read full excerpt from How to Raise a Family on Less ebook