At the beginning of March, my husband and I laid out a few goals for the month. Here’s a recap, and how it went for us:

Use credit cards for gas only. We ended up not using our credit cards at all, and put gas on our debit cards instead, since there was no “hold” on our cards. This is the first time we haven’t used our credit cards um…probably since we first got them a few years ago. I do think we spent less than normally, and I don’t plan to use our credit cards again for the foreseeable future.

Determine how much money we will truly need in our emergency fund. We originally thought it would be about $10,800 for six months worth of expenses, and for now, that’s still going to be the goal number. Of course, we’ll have to revisit that number from time to time, as our rent,car things, and insurance expenses change.

Using our ING account more. We haven’t made the switch to using it as our primary bank, and I’m not sure if we’re going to do that now. Our emergency fund is there, but we’re still using our brick and mortar bank to pay most bills and for our checking account. (By the way, if you’re interested in opening an ING account, please let me know! When your first deposit is $250, you get $25 and I get $10).

We were saving for a new laptop, but now we won’t need to. Shane fixed it quite cheaply, hooray!

I’m pleased with our progress for March. We put $861into our emergency fund. Also, we had accumulated $342 in snowflakes in March.

Goals for April

• Find new sources of snowflakes, and try to accumulate at least $250 in extra money to put toward savings
• Put at least $1,000 into emergency savings this month
• Don’t use credit cards at all

That’s all I can think of for now. Three cheers for the almost-arrival of April!

(Photo credit: John Doyle, who submitted this photo to the BBC)