It's all about The Benjamins
For this weeks Together on Tuesday topic is budget....how do you manage your money. YIKES!
Cold hard cash, moolah, The Bacon, dough, Benjamins, dinero, buckaroos, smackers, bones, greenbacks, or chump change. No matter what you call it money is on all of our minds. Whether we are trying to make more of it, save more of it or spend more of it. Money makes the world go round.
Money can't buy me love and money can't buy me happiness, but it sure does help to have money sometimes. It's hard when you live in a way that you want to be frugal, you want to be responsible with your money, you want to teach your children good habits, and society is telling you that you need to buy more and spend more on things that you don't need. Why do we has humans want to have more than our neighbors? Why do we feel a need to keep up with The Jones'? Who the heck cares about The Jones' anyway?
Budget, whats a budget? This is not something that we are great at. This topic is kind of hard for me to write about. It's hard writing about something that your not good at and admitting your flaws to all your friends and family and then also sharing it with the world.
I talked it over with Nolan before writing about this and we decided that our budget style is fly by the seat of your pants. Could we save more? Yes. Could we spend less? Yes. Are we going into debt? No.Do we have debt other than our mortgage and student loans? No. Do we have savings? Yes. Are there plenty of things that we could manage more about our finances? Yes.
Our monthly budgets consists of Nolan (who is our resident accountant) looking at our credit card statements (we rarely use cash or checks, it's always the credit card) and letting me know that we need to watch our spending. So for several weeks we do a great job, but slowly bad habits come back into play. It's not that we buy a ton of crap, but sometimes we just don't watch our spending closely. We will spend more at the grocery than we need to, we will go out to eat more times that month than the previous month. Sometimes our spending is just more because there are things that we need to buy....last month's credit card statement was higher than usual, we also had things that we needed to buy that ended up totaling about $1000 and really, it was things that we needed, like the new compact car seat for Georgia. While the car seat was expensive, it was cheaper than 60 months of car payments. And buying that car seat actually saved us from buying a new car. In the long run, while we spent more money than normal for that particular item, it's saving us money.
Truly, we try to live a modest life. We don't buy things because they are the best, newest, most expensive things out there. We have a basic cable package. We love hand me downs and buy things second hand. We get the free cell phones when we renew our package every two years. We have resisted upgrading our cell phone package and still keep the cheapest one that isn't even offered anymore. We don't have a texting plan. Sure we would use it if we had it, but by not having the plan we rarely send a text. Most months, its money saved. Both cars are paid off and while they are reliable, they are not fancy and not new. And we live in a small house that we can easily afford. It would have been really easy to justify a move to a bigger house since the twins are coming. But we decided to do some rearranging and make our current house work, for a least a couple more years.
We are also trying to teach Georgia some responsibility with money. We try to let her buy her own things. I think that she gets a sense of pride buying it herself and she can get whatever she wants as long as she can afford it. So whatever money she earns or gets for birthdays and holidays goes into her bank. Usually when we go somewhere special or go on a trip, we get that money out and she gets to spend it however she would like. Sometimes there are things that she just can't buy.....usually if it's a couple of dollars good ol' mom and dad will help out a little bit, but most of the time we make her stick to her budget and find something that she really wants instead of some crappy plastic toy that will be given to Goodwill in a few months.
So, while I say that we fly by the seat of our pants with our budget, we do have a certain dollar amount that we save every month. Nolan contributes to his 401K. His employer matches a certain percent of his paycheck that he puts into it. I don't know the details, but it's like free money and we would be stupid not to do that. Also, we have a checking account for our mortgage. Money from his paycheck is directly deposited into that account. We put more money in that account than we need to....you just never know. Most of the time, we are able to let that build up and then it goes directly into our savings account. Sometimes we have to use the savings....doctor bills (which we had a ton of after Violet died....all sorts of testing. we have good insurance but they just don't cover 100% of everything all the time and it adds up), home improvements, car repairs....things that you don't really want to spend money on, but need to sometimes. And then sometimes we are able to take part of it and use it for fun things too, like our Disney vacation. It's always hard when the money dwindles down, but that is what it's there for.....sometimes for a rainy day and sometimes for fun days! There have been plenty of times when we have be so thankful that we have had some money saved.
That's my take on this weeks topic.....probably not the best role model, but I'm not in debt, I have money saved, I own my own home and cars. I usually feel like we are doing a lot better than most people our age.
Check out what Danielle, Michelle, Charlotte, and Sarah have to say about their budget. Maybe you and I can learn something from them!!!!
Cold hard cash, moolah, The Bacon, dough, Benjamins, dinero, buckaroos, smackers, bones, greenbacks, or chump change. No matter what you call it money is on all of our minds. Whether we are trying to make more of it, save more of it or spend more of it. Money makes the world go round.
Money can't buy me love and money can't buy me happiness, but it sure does help to have money sometimes. It's hard when you live in a way that you want to be frugal, you want to be responsible with your money, you want to teach your children good habits, and society is telling you that you need to buy more and spend more on things that you don't need. Why do we has humans want to have more than our neighbors? Why do we feel a need to keep up with The Jones'? Who the heck cares about The Jones' anyway?
Budget, whats a budget? This is not something that we are great at. This topic is kind of hard for me to write about. It's hard writing about something that your not good at and admitting your flaws to all your friends and family and then also sharing it with the world.
I talked it over with Nolan before writing about this and we decided that our budget style is fly by the seat of your pants. Could we save more? Yes. Could we spend less? Yes. Are we going into debt? No.Do we have debt other than our mortgage and student loans? No. Do we have savings? Yes. Are there plenty of things that we could manage more about our finances? Yes.
Our monthly budgets consists of Nolan (who is our resident accountant) looking at our credit card statements (we rarely use cash or checks, it's always the credit card) and letting me know that we need to watch our spending. So for several weeks we do a great job, but slowly bad habits come back into play. It's not that we buy a ton of crap, but sometimes we just don't watch our spending closely. We will spend more at the grocery than we need to, we will go out to eat more times that month than the previous month. Sometimes our spending is just more because there are things that we need to buy....last month's credit card statement was higher than usual, we also had things that we needed to buy that ended up totaling about $1000 and really, it was things that we needed, like the new compact car seat for Georgia. While the car seat was expensive, it was cheaper than 60 months of car payments. And buying that car seat actually saved us from buying a new car. In the long run, while we spent more money than normal for that particular item, it's saving us money.
Truly, we try to live a modest life. We don't buy things because they are the best, newest, most expensive things out there. We have a basic cable package. We love hand me downs and buy things second hand. We get the free cell phones when we renew our package every two years. We have resisted upgrading our cell phone package and still keep the cheapest one that isn't even offered anymore. We don't have a texting plan. Sure we would use it if we had it, but by not having the plan we rarely send a text. Most months, its money saved. Both cars are paid off and while they are reliable, they are not fancy and not new. And we live in a small house that we can easily afford. It would have been really easy to justify a move to a bigger house since the twins are coming. But we decided to do some rearranging and make our current house work, for a least a couple more years.
We are also trying to teach Georgia some responsibility with money. We try to let her buy her own things. I think that she gets a sense of pride buying it herself and she can get whatever she wants as long as she can afford it. So whatever money she earns or gets for birthdays and holidays goes into her bank. Usually when we go somewhere special or go on a trip, we get that money out and she gets to spend it however she would like. Sometimes there are things that she just can't buy.....usually if it's a couple of dollars good ol' mom and dad will help out a little bit, but most of the time we make her stick to her budget and find something that she really wants instead of some crappy plastic toy that will be given to Goodwill in a few months.
So, while I say that we fly by the seat of our pants with our budget, we do have a certain dollar amount that we save every month. Nolan contributes to his 401K. His employer matches a certain percent of his paycheck that he puts into it. I don't know the details, but it's like free money and we would be stupid not to do that. Also, we have a checking account for our mortgage. Money from his paycheck is directly deposited into that account. We put more money in that account than we need to....you just never know. Most of the time, we are able to let that build up and then it goes directly into our savings account. Sometimes we have to use the savings....doctor bills (which we had a ton of after Violet died....all sorts of testing. we have good insurance but they just don't cover 100% of everything all the time and it adds up), home improvements, car repairs....things that you don't really want to spend money on, but need to sometimes. And then sometimes we are able to take part of it and use it for fun things too, like our Disney vacation. It's always hard when the money dwindles down, but that is what it's there for.....sometimes for a rainy day and sometimes for fun days! There have been plenty of times when we have be so thankful that we have had some money saved.
That's my take on this weeks topic.....probably not the best role model, but I'm not in debt, I have money saved, I own my own home and cars. I usually feel like we are doing a lot better than most people our age.
Check out what Danielle, Michelle, Charlotte, and Sarah have to say about their budget. Maybe you and I can learn something from them!!!!
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