This post is in response to a contest at Free From Broke. Check out her blog when you get a chance.

My financial tipping point (the point where I decided to take more control of our finances and live more frugally) came a few months ago. (It actually wasn't anything too big that tipped me to being more frugal, so don't expect a great story here.) Debt free (praise God!), we had a baby in August- which stretched us a bit financially- and our lease was ending in February on the house we had been in for the past several months. We took a look at the housing market, compared renting to buying, prayed, and finally decided it was a better decision to buy than to rent again. It was going to cost just a couple hundred dollars more a month to buy a house than to rent, but that money would actually be an investment for us rather than an investment for a landlord. So we ended up buying a perfect house for us, and we got an amazing deal on it. But that put a little more strain on already stretched finances. We could make it by alright (or else we wouldn't have decided to buy the house), but after all our bills, giving, expenses, and 401K investment, there wasn't as much as we would have liked leftover for savings each month. (And our cars are both ten years old with a ton of miles, so we'll likely need to have some money saved to buy a car in the next year or so.)

A friend then told me about the CVS game and Money Saving Mom at about this time too, so I began to explore those, as well as some different ways to save money. And I had been tossing the idea of a more simplistic life around in my head too- what we need vs. want, and where we, as a Christian family, should be spending our money, as well as how we could increase our giving. So all of this lead up to the tipping point.