Ugh- another Reboot

Well, so my last foray into the blogging world went airy. I stopped writing because at the end of the day I was usually too exhausted or I was doing things, like dishes, laundry or putting in extra hours at work.

It seemed I just didn't have an extra minute, and when I did I usually spent it doing things like taking a shower. I never believed people when they said that having an infant was a full time gig and would take all your time. I (mistakenly) thought, hey infants sleep a lot, I'll have plenty of time to get things done. Well, that's the biggest load of crap ever, infants, even when sleeping, monopolize every second of every day.

Now, for those that easily get their hackles raised when kids are discussed; I love my son more than anything in the world. I wouldn't trade a single minute with him for anything else. I just didn't realize (like many first time parents) how much life will really change once you finally get your amazing bundle of joy.

We also fell off the budget wagon again, so, we're trying to get back on it. To start off, we're taking a long look at our spending and itemizing our purchases. My husband and I each have a credit card that we use, we do not use our debit cards and rarely use or have cash on us. So, it's pretty easy. We're going to be tracking them the old fashioned way, with a spreadsheet. It's a little more time consuming, but won't cost us anything but our time.

I'll be posting screen shots of these to show how I'm tracking everything. I'm also going to be trying different ways to make supplement income. We'll see how I do, so far I haven't been super successful.

Budgeting

I am not proud to say that my husband and I are living at the edge of our budget. We decided to take a mortgage that was a little higher than we were comfortable because we found our dream home. When we purchased the house we knew we were going to need to purchase an SUV because of where it was located. During our process of making the decision to take the mortgage and purchase an SUV, we were not planning on having a child. We had tried for six years to get pregnant and were feeling like it wasn't going to happen for us. As fate would have it, we found out three days after signing the paperwork that we were expecting our first child.

As you can imagine, after trying for so long we were absolutely ecstatic! But now, we're working diligently to pay off our student loans, mortgage and the car payment, all while having the expenses of a newborn.

This is why I've started writing this blog. I want to chronicle our journey to getting out of debt. We're going to be setting financial goals and trying to meet them. We don't like feeling like we are living paycheck to paycheck and not able to save anything.

My first order of business was to complete a financial review. I went through our credit card statements for the last three months to find out where we are spending our money and where we can cut out spending. Then I completed a budget. This may sound daunting but just take it piece by piece.

We thankfully only have three credit cards and never use our debit card for purchases. So, I started with one credit card and went thru three months of charges. I separated each store or purchase type and added up each one for that month. I listed some categories I used below:

Example Categories:  

Walmart
Dinner out
Grocery
Gas Station
Car Maintenance
Pharmacy

You'll need to tailor the categories to fit your personal purchasing patterns. I did this for all three of our cards and then totaled all the categories up to find out between all three cards what we spent. When listing out all the charges, don't skip one 'just because it'll never happen again' be honest wit your budget and yourself. If there is an expense that you won't be making again put it in a generic category. For us, the generic one was the part we bought for the dishwasher, we won't be buying it again but it was important. So, I put it under household maintenance.

This will give you a base line of what you're spending and where. This is really important to see where you can "trim the fat" or how much you need to budget for essentials. Out of all the times I've tried to budget, I've found this is the most important step. Without knowing what is being spent and where it's going you'll never be able to stick to your budget.

There are tons of sites that you can get free budget work sheets or even some that you can buy. I've tried some of the free ones, but I've never had any luck with them. So, for me the fastest and best way is to just put it all in an excel spread sheet.

Once you've done this you're halfway there! Don't give up and don't stop. Now go through your fixed monthly expenses, fuel, gas (for your car), mortgage, rent, etc. Once you've got all of these written down and added up you need to list out any and all expenses you have that are yearly, bi-yearly or quarterly, such as dog licensing fees, insurance, water bill, sewer bill, etc.

For those expenses you'll want to separate them to calculate how much you'll have to save each month to make sure you have them when they're due.

Next I calculated our monthly income. Once I have all the numbers, I subtracted all the monthly expenses, including the amount needed to be set aside for the other expenses, and found the amount we have left over at the end of every month. This is the amount we have to put in the savings account or to make an extra payment on one of our loans.

I hope this helps you, not only get motivated but maybe help you to get over that hump to get yourself financially motivated.

Snow Day

Today I got to have a snow day with my little guy. My husband's employer decided to make him work extra hours with less than a days notice. This caused major child care problems for us, which forced me to take the day off. Normally, our daycare could have taken him for another day, but today we were getting a major winter storm. So, my husband needed to take our only SUV to get there and back safely and the hill we live on requires an SUV.

I know, you're thinking, well isn't it your fault for not having 2 SUV's. We definitely share in responsibility, but at this point we can't afford a second one. Prior to this year we had both of our vehicles paid off, and were trying to save to purchase a vehicle in full. Well, when we found our dream house, that went out the window. We had to purchase the SUV or my husband would have to call out of work a lot. We do live in New England and snow is inevitable.

During my day of child wrangling I was writing up a couple of blogs to post and realized I didn't like my blog name. So, I've decided to have a blog name that embodies what what I'm doing/writing in my blog. I've changed it to Frugal in NH and will be working this week to get my posts moved over.

Thank you for stopping by and letting me vent a little! I hope you enjoy my blog and the photos taken of today's storm.