The $500 Challenge - The Final Tally and Link-Up

It is time to add up our money and see how close we came to finding $500. I started this challenge because I wanted to find $500 in spending money for our family's summer vacation. I didn't want to dig into our savings and charging our vacation on a credit card isn't an option.

So how did I do?

• $180.00 - Yard Sale
• $85.00 Change jar
• $50.00 Visa Card Rebate for switching to a new electric company with a better rate. Read here for more information on the electric rate increase that took place in PA.
• I was hoping once I reviewed our April spending that we would have come in under budget, but our spending in April was right on budget, almost to the dollar. I guess I could be happy that we didn't over-spend, but honestly, I didn't concentrate on reducing our spending in April as much as I should have. I proved to myself back in January that when we put our minds to it, we, as a family, can reduce our overall monthly spending, but that didn't happen in April.

So, our total came in at $315. I am $185 short of my goal, but I am not going to beat myself up. The yard sale took a lot of my time in the beginning of the month and I was happy that we were able to make $180 AND get rid of a lot of stuff. I will just have to concentrate between now and our vacation to find the difference.

How did you do? I can't wait to read all about your challenge. I want to thank all of you who participated in the challenge. It was interesting to read about everyone's progress, set-backs and successes.

If you are a blogger participating in the challenge and making updates on your site about your progress, please link up your final update with Mr. Linky. If you are not a blogger and are participating in the challenge, please let us know how you are doing in the comment section.

Make sure you take some time to check back over the next few days and visit the other links to see how the other bloggers are doing with their challenge. This is a great opportunity to find/meet/support other bloggers and get some ideas on how to find $500!

A few Mr. Linky guidelines:

• Please link your most recent challenge updates to Mr. Linky. If you are not a blogger, please tell us about your challenge updates in the comment section.
• Please post the link to your update, NOT to your homepage. To do this, click on your update post, copy and paste the whole url address into the Mr. Linky.
• I also ask that you post a link back to Family Balance Sheet in your article.
• If you are reading this post via a reader or email, you will need to click through to post your link and to visit others who have linked up.

Thanks for reading FamilyBalanceSheet.

If you would like to receive FREE updates of FBS through your RSS Feed, please click here to sign up. Or sign up for FREE email updates, by submitting your email address in the top left side of this site. Or click here to follow on Twitter.