Poor and happy?

My DH and I have looked over our spending and we agree that we should live debt free. We are using Oprah's debt diet as a guide. WOW! It is hard!!! I thought this would be easy for us. We quit using credit cards a long time ago. We have no credit card debt right now. We don't have a mortgage and we don't live with lots of extras (Oprah's site calls it the latte factor). We don't get coffee on the go. We don't buy bottled water or many sodas, we hardly ever eat out, we don't smoke, I am never near a vending machine, I don't chew gum, we only use candy for rewards for difficult math or spelling drills for our son. We don't get the paper, and I only get 1 magazine that I will cancel when my 2 years is up. We do have a cell phone and we will cancel that when the contract runs out. Anyway I thought we were doing so GREAT! UNTIL!!!!! We got to the spot that said Other Living Expenses 25% of income. That is all food, clothing, entertainment, Travel, Childcare, medical expenses, Tithing, charity and other. I thought we would do so well looking this over. After all we don't do much traveling, we have very little expense with entertainment (we don't rent movies or even have our dish hooked up right now). I hope the Internet doesn't have to go only time will tell. Childcare is no cost to us. I am ALWAYS home with the children. We gave up most of our eating out a few months ago. I haven't spent much at all on clothing in the last year on any of us. BUT we still went over in this group!!!! They have a spot for tithing but when you give 10% before taxes that puts us at about 15% out of our check. Once that is done we have spent 15 of our 25% That gives us 10% to live on! We have been doing this for a few weeks now and I think we are still going over our 10% but we are getting closer. I doubt we will be able to get into the 10% number with Christmas so close but we are going to do what we can.... I think the other areas that we are not over in our spending like housing and credit card debt should keep us on track some but it would be nice to be in the right spots on that pie graph. KWIM?

Now to the reason I wrote all of that....... I am going to try and post one craft a week that cost me NOTHING! I will be using the supplies I have in my house already but I am going to try to not spend any money at all. I hope that I am creative enough to do this! I hope to make some Christmas gifts along the way. I am going to try and start a project tonight and with my DD cutting a tooth I don't know how far I will get but I will try to get one a week done. I think if I keep looking at this as a fun challenge it will feel better. If I am busy crafting I will not have time to want to shop and spend. Tune in later to see how this all turns out.........