$20 Bill Challenge...

I mentioned the other day when writing about my minimal goals for 2011, that my husband and I were going to attempt the $20 challenge.

I read about this unique venture about a year ago over on this blog. We had grand ideas of attempting this challenge then, but somehow decided to buy a house...and well all good intentions went out the window. (And I fully recognize that I'm seven months pregnant & this challenge might be an epic fail with Baby #2 set to arrive this Spring...)

My husband and I thrive off of challenges, goals & just a general direction for where we're headed and where we want to end up. Our biggest obstacle in life for the last several months was a knowledge of knowing we needed more money coming in--and how to get there. I've spent the last few months feeling quite down about finances, jobs & even about having to work from home. But lately? We're feeling good--we're feeling excited---we're feeling thankful.

And that attitude just begs for a challenge to sharpen our creativity to think outside of the box, stretch a buck, try something new & learn some lessons along the way.

We'll each start out with $20. The goal is to turn that original $20 into more money. We've set our own rules--here's the basic rundown.

Our rules:
-You cannot "borrow" money if your funds are all tied up elsewhere
-We'll track any money coming in or out
-We're giving ourselves one year
-You can use items on hand (ie: fabric for crafts)--but anything purchased must come from your $20 (ie: additional thread)
-You can sell items to add to your $20 investment, but they must be agreed upon! Furthermore, we've decided to split the money with savings for anything we sell--& any large items (example an old bed we have) the money will be split three ways: Jon, Rachel, Savings. It's our hope that "sharing" with our savings will help grow that area!

...and that's it!

We're hoping for fresh ideas to get us excited about earning and saving money again & we're hopeful this will inspire us to de-junk and sell all those items we keep saying "we need to sell_____"

Please join in if you want! We're hoping to update monthly with how our challenge is going. My personal goal is to turn the original $20 into $200. Ambitious goal, but I have a few ideas that I'm pretty excited about.