Going for Not Broke

I mentioned in a previous post  that I haven't been showing much self discipline financially so far this year. Thankfully, for now, I'm having a spell of doing better. Sitting down and seeing exactly where I am helped get me back on track. Hopefully, I'll continue to do better. First off, I'm going scale back the anniversary party  I was going to hold for my folks to just a big family dinner. I was going to do games with door prizes, but now, I've decided to just make lasagna using my mom's best recipe. It will still be costly, because it will be dinner for at least 20 people, but it will still be easier on my pocketbook. The next thing I hope to do is to figure my checkbook* daily. I have a tendency to try to keep track of it mentally, then when I start to fear that I might've left something out of my mental total, I'll charge necessities, like gas or diapers. So far, for the last week, I've done better with my checkbook. And knowing exactly whe...

For several years, my husband and I have kept track of our total debt and spending with spreadsheets charting what goes up and what goes down. On a monthly basis, we would get together and look at where we stand financially. My thinking was that seeing just how much we owe would force us to keep that total in mind and strengthen our resolve to pay it down. Overall, I think it's helped, but it alone hasn't been enough to inspire us to eliminate all of our bad financial behaviors. If it were, we would've been a lot better off several years ago. It has, however, inspired us to be a little better about our spending. I know this because we haven't been as diligent about the spreadsheets since our daughter was born. I say "we" because my husband is further behind in his share than he typically is, too, but I haven't really even tried to keep up with my part, especially this year after all of the long trips back and forth to visit my dad in the hospital. Even...

This has been a challenging year for my family. My dad had a precancerous tumor on his pancreas and is recovering slowly from the surgery to remove it. He's had a couple of setbacks, one that lasted three weeks, but we're all hopeful he'll be back on track soon. Partly because of that, I want to host a family get-together. Mom and Dad will have their 45th anniversary this October so that seems like a perfect time to hold it. I think I have a lead on a FREE place big enough to accommodate my siblings, their kids and my parents. As for the rest -- the food, decorations and activities -- I'll have to plan according to what's on sale and when. Immediately after that, I'll be planning a baby shower for my kid sis. I hope to get the same venue for both parties. Again, though, I want to keep an eye out for deals for decorations. There is only so much I can do about the food in advance, but I figured I'd start setting aside money for both feasts now.

I had a rather hectic Monday and Tuesday morning, so I took an unplanned break from blogging yesterday. Hopefully, I can keep up with it better from here on out. But that's not the only thing that I've fallen behind on. To help us stay aware of where we are debt-wise, my husband and I have a meeting every month in which we both look at what we still owe and see how much progress (and sometimes, I must admit, it is anti-progress) we've made toward our goal to be debt-free. The meeting is tentatively scheduled for the first of the month, though sometimes we have it on the 3rd, or 6th or whenever, based on when we're able to gather up everything and jot down the necessary numbers. Well, tomorrow is the date of our next "meeting," and we've yet to meet in October yet. Oh well. I guess next month's will be a double meeting. Happy Halloween, everyone!

We've had a crazy last couple of weeks. My daughter, my husband and I have all been sick, with my daughter getting the worst of it. We've been short staffed at work, I've had a freelance project to get done and my daughter turned a year old. Amid all of the extra running around, we've spent some extra money: I wasn't able to shop during Aldi's store hours, so I wound up doing all of our grocery shopping at Walmart, which costs more. We've had a lot more meals on the go (fast food). Hopefully, everything goes back to normal for a while. At first, the frozen dinners I had stored in the freezer served as not only work lunches but also as home meals -- until I started running low on them; that's when we started eating out more. Having the stockpile, then, worked to our advantage. I just need to find a way to keep a bunch of them handy even when things get crazy. I don't know how to avoid having to do all of my grocery shopping at Walmart, thou...

This is another grocery week for us. Last time, we went overbudget to the tune of $60. Wow! I haven't done that since I was doing the bulk of our shopping at Walmart. I keep hearing how the drought is supposed to start driving food prices up; I don't know if the increased cost last time was at least partly to blame on higher prices or if something else was to blame, such as running out of a lot of high-dollar grocery items -- laundry soap, other cleansers, toilet paper, etc. -- at the same time. Hopefully, this week goes a lot better, but perhaps I'll start hanging on to my receipts so that I can know exactly why we might have future bill surges and may be able to predict and offset them so that I don't have to take from another budgeted item to make up the shortfall.

Last week , I said I didn't really get a whole lot of tips from watching shows like "Princess" and "Til Debt Do Us Part," but this past Saturday, I think I did. I'm sure host Gail Vaz-Oxlade has asked the people she's helping to set goals and create a plan for what they want to do, but perhaps I've never noticed until the most recent show. Therefore, that's what I'd like to do. Set goals -- beyond just a vague have it paid off by the time my daughter starts school -- and develop a plan for how to get there.

One money-spending habit I've been reluctant to give up is dine-out Fridays, which is basically just what it sounds like. Each Friday -- for years now -- my husband and I have dined out rather than sit in the breakroom and have sack lunches. Fridays can be rather hectic days, and getting out of the building just seems like more of a break to me than sitting in the breakroom. Over the past week, I've been thinking about cutting it back to just one Friday a month, because each time my husband and I go out to eat like that, it costs us roughly $25, or $100 a month that could be going toward bills. Add to that the fact that my husband and I both need to lose weight, and dining on a more nutritious meal that I can control the ingredients in just seems to make more sense. I've pretty much decided that tomorrow will be our last dine-out Friday until September. Hopefully we can stick to that, because an extra $75 in our pockets each month can go a long, long way.

A few years ago, I read that knowing where you stand financially will go a long way in helping you pay down your debt. After that, my husband and I started having a mini-meeting at the end of every month during which we look at what we owe. My thinking is that maybe seeing the total number would spur us to focus more on paying it down. We've seen a decrease every year since we've been doing that, though not as much as I would hope. Since our daughter was born, the meetings have been more and more spaced out until we wound up skipping them altogether from April until just yesterday, when finally, we sat down to get another glimpse of it. Over the past few months when we haven't been looking at it, we haven't done as well. I think in our case, it really helps to keep abreast of where we are. Because we made the time to look at it yesterday, I'm hoping we continue doing so from here on out.

One of the gifts I received for my birthday a few weeks ago was an Amazon gift card, which I used to get an e-subscription for my Kindle and an e-book called "Coach Yourself Thin: Five Steps to Retrain Your Mind, Reclaim Your Power, and Lose the Weight for Good," by Greg Hottinger and Michael Scholtz. The book has excellent reviews on Amazon, so good, I'm a little skeptical of them. Seeing a book with 80 reviews and an average five-star rating is extremely rare; I'm not even sure I've seen that before on any other book I've sought out. I've just started it, and so far, I like it. I can see a correlation between some of the thought patterns described and my own struggles with weight loss. I also think some might apply to how I view my finances, too. I haven't reached any of the "five steps" yet, but I'm wondering if some might translate into ways that I could coach myself financially as well. We'll see.

My father-in-law believes in having as little tax withheld from your check as possible without having to owe. He says that setting yourself up to get a refund each year just gives the government an interest-free loan on money that you could've been earning interest on yourself. The goal, then, is to get as close to nothing owed, nothing refunded as possible. That makes sense to me. Really, it does. But living there makes me nervous. What if a tax credit I got one year doesn't exist the next? What if the few freelance projects I do every year pays me more than I've allowed for? I'd always rather have a refund. Big, large, it doesn't matter. To ensure I get something, I've always extra taken out. For the last couple of years, it's been $30 a paycheck. However, with extra coming out of my check for my daughter's health insurance now, I could really use the $30, so for the first time ever, I have nothing extra being set back from my check. Scary. 

In the past, my husband and I never set aside money specifically for doctor visits. We didn’t see a need, really. When scheduled visits would come up, we’d use overtime pay or trim what we had planned to send to a credit card, or do some other last-minute juggling to come up with funds for the copay and any medicines we’d need. Things are much different since our daughter was born. I didn’t realize how many routine doctor visits babies have -- 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, etc. Plus, she’s been about five times in addition to the routine visits, two for ear infections, two for follow-ups to make sure the ear infections cleared up, and once more just this week for a severe case of allergies. Not only are we paying doctor bills more often, but we’re also paying more each time we go, because our copay went up this year by $20. OUCH! This week, when the allergies overtook our little girl and my husband and I debated about how to meet the copay, I realized that I should’ve had a category ...

A couple years ago, I read Dave Ramsey's "The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness." One thing he recommends is putting cash in separate envelopes for each budget category. I tried this, but the envelopes got very quickly got ratty in my purse. For a couple of months, I got a fresh envelope every time one became a little too worn for use, but eventually, I abandoned the system altogether. Because I'm trying to focus on getting my debt paid down again, I'd like to go back to using the envelope system, but rather than use the envelopes, I've decided to use a coupon holder, which is much sturdier, instead. I bought one with a cloth cover several months ago when I first decided to give extreme couponing a go, and I found another last week that's all clear plastic. At first, I planned to use the new one for my budgeted cash, but then my husband pointed out that because it's clear, everyone can see how much cash I have on hand. So I...