One Step At A Time

On the 24th of this month, Felicia and I sat together and had our first Budget Committee Meeting. We instituted Dave's rules and got through the meeting without an argument. The goal of the meeting was to produce a realistic budget for the month of July and we thought we did. One of the rules for me was to shut up and give the budget to Felicia. That was hard to do. My hands were actually shaking when I handed her the budget and had to watch her make changes to it. In the middle of our meeting, the part where she looks it over and makes changes, I had to run to the store to get diapers for the kids and when I came back she explained the changes and how she made the changes balance to zero again. Her changes were reasonable and we agreed to the budget. I am pretty sure we both felt good about the budget and were looking forward to putting into effect. The next morning while I was getting ready for work I realized we forgot to budget for some very important items. We actually...

Last Sunday was our 3rd class in Financial Peace University, and we talked about the the dreaded B-word, Budget. Since I read Total Money Makeover months ago, we have been doing the budget and have posted several times about it. Therefore, I am not going to go over every detail of this past Sunday's class, but will discuss some of the issues I have with budgeting so far. I believe if I keep honestly critiquing us and our money management, it will help us in the long run to win with money. Having a lot of money is not the desired result of this process, the results we are looking for are Financial Peace, retire with dignity, and pursue some of our dreams later in life. Below are just some of the things and habits that gets in our way of achieving our goals. One of the things that I do that absolutely does not work is create the budget and never look at it again. I work hard to make a zero based budget and making sure every dollar has a name, but never pull out the game plan to m...

So far it has been a horrible start to the New Year as far as budgeting goes. I am not trying to make excuses, but we need to find out why we are doing so bad. I think I know...we are getting anxious about the birth of our daughter. Felicia has been feeling bad the last couple of weeks and this week she has been having irregular contractions. We keeping coming up with excuses not to cook or to buy something we really don't need. Deep down we know we are just trying relieve stress or make ourselves feel better at that moment. Now is the time to stop and tighten the ropes a little bit. Felicia has stopped working two weeks before we planned, but the good news is that we did so good in savings that we have enough in an emergency fund to survive. Thanks for the advice on that one, Dave Ramsey! We stockpiled some cash and now we need to be careful in how we spend it. It would be a shame to do so well and then manage those funds poorly. Even though we have done poorly this mont...

We did the budget and the breakdown by pay dates and thought we were all set. And BAM!!! We messed up. We did the budget put it away did not look at again to make sure we were spending the way we agreed. It's crazy we take 2 steps forward and one step back. I budgeted 150.00 for eating out for the whole month and in the first week we spent 183.00 by going to Olive Garden, P F Changs, Mickey D's, Bakery, and Donut Shop. We are not starting the year very good but hopefully we can get it turned around very quickly. On a happier note, we are counting down until our baby girl is born. She is supposed to be here Feb 2nd, I can't wait.