Tax Refund

We received our tax refund Friday. As of today, Monday, it's gone. Every last dime, as well as, some additional $$ from dh's pay. The funny thing is, we don't have a big screen tv or something cool like that to show for it. We used it to pay off a credit card.

The Bible says, the borrower is servant to the lender. We are finding out how true this is. We've noticed lately the economy is terrible. Almost every other house in town is empty or for sale. With our own finances, we've noticed a certain credit card raising the amount of minimum payment (without more credit being used) and changing the due date to sooner (without my request). Probably hoping to incur some late fees on top of the obscene amount of interest they were charging!

After reading Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover and with the prices of everything going up (except our family income). We decided it would be best to pay off all consumer debt. We have been working with "gazelle intensity." Now, we will "snowball" what we were paying on our credit card to the $2500 we owe on our appliances.

We hope to have our appliances paid off by Sept. - before the 12 mo same as cash expires and we have to pay a penny of interest! Then, we hope to snowball to our mortgage, because we don't have anymore credit card debt.

All overtime has been cut at dh's work. Praise God he still has a job! I have been doing a lot of things to make/save money from home, such as online surveys, scanning my purchases for a consumer company, CVSing, rebates, selling on ebay, couponing, making a menu and sticking to it (I'm going to try to post these, as well as, cost per serving), and many other things.

Where did your tax rebate go? What are you doing to stretch your budget? Do you have any ideas for making money at home? Please share!