Are you ready for Christmas?

No? Me neither.

Don’t worry, it’s still about six months away!

But what you do now to save money, could determine whether it’s a happy Christmas, or a Christmas like so many before it (if you’re like me)… a happy season, with underlying, nagging guilt, frustration, and anxiety over debt.

But start saving now, just a little every week, and you can start a snowball of savings. Here’s how I’m working on saving for Christmas in July.

We all know laundry is a pain. It’s the last chore we want to do and the one that ALWAYS needs to be done.

And with kids in the house who wear something for five minutes then chuck it into the hamper, it seems like there is so much laundry, there must surely be people living in our house that we don’t know about.

Life is hectic. And moms’ lives can be a downright circus. But one thing that can contain and manage some of that crazy is planning.

I’ve been meal planning for years and frankly couldn’t get by without it. It’s a life saver for my time, my budget and my sanity.

I would start off each pay period with the best intentions. I promise I did. I even followed my own advice and used my Cashless Budget Tracker, budgeted for expected expenses and tracked spending in each category.

Yet so many times I would come up short and have to dip into savings or rack up more credit card debt to get us to the next paycheck.

So, what was happening? Sabotage. Self-sabotage. Ugly, messy, make you want to kick your own ass sabotage.

The one thing that kept my budget train hurtling off the tracks was my failure to plan.