One Step At A Time

She is right!!! I am not sure what it is, but when I get really stressed out the first thing I want to do is hide and not deal with anything. When we were engaged and moved in together, we put our finances together and tried to run our household. I know when I was young my mom handled the money and I saw how it would stress her out a lot, so I guess I thought I would let Felicia deal with it. We split it up 50/50, her job was to pay the bills and my job was to complain about having no money. Now, that is not working together. Since I did not where the money was going, I wanted to spend like we had all the money in the world. In the end, I realized it was not fair to Felicia. She had to keep track of all the bills, pay them on time, and when money was thin, deal with me complaining. Now we sit down before each pay day and spend the money before it is in the bank. We look at what bills are coming up, what we are going to spend on household things, but the very first thing we do ...

We have been on somewhat of a budget lately, thanks to Andres' fascination with Dave Ramsey, a financial guru that he listens to on the radio. Even though I am slightly sick of hearing Dave Ramsey's name, I have to say that his principles are working for us. We have put close to $2500 away in savings for when I am out on FMLA and I have to admit that it feels good to not even miss the money that we are putting away every time we get paid. We always make sure to pay ourselves first and then focus on the important bills, and then we pay the not so important bills (cable and DSL). We've also been eating at home a lot more often lately, and I was telling Andres that my mindset has changed from a couple of months ago. Whenever we were ready to eat dinner, I would always think, what are we going to go out and buy for dinner? Now I think, what are we going to go home and cook for dinner? We still splurge a little bit whenever we have a little bit of extra money, but it hasn't ...