Being an adult has it's
awesome days... like days I want to have ice cream for breakfast or stay up
late watching movies. No parent hovering over me telling me ice
cream isn't a suitable breakfast choice (I beg to differ) or I have work in the
morning and I should get to bed instead of watching movies all night.
But a lot of the times,
being an adult really sucks. It comes with an insane amount of
responsibility, bills, places to be, home to keep up with, relationships to
nurture, metabolism slowing down... it's all very tragic. One of the
things that Mike and I have not put our adult pants on with was the whole budget thing.
We've been getting by for the last 3 years of our joint finances with not
much to show for.
After having a couple rough
months this year where it felt like we were barely going to get by, we sat down
and shit got real. We realized that we are frivolously spending our money
on food (lunches, dinners, coffee (me) in the morning) and a lot of little
things here and there that added up like books, movies, hobby stuff, makeup
etc. We were getting to the point where we were beginning to step out of
living within our means.
We went over our net income
+ monthly expenses and we (happily) realized that we had quite a bit of money
left over but didnt realize because we were pissing it away and didnt
understand where it was going. Sigh.
What did we do?
We created a 2 week menu
plan that had a shopping list. We just dont make it to the grocery store
every week - we've tried. We just dont. The two week plan has
worked.
We also got a lot of fruit,
veggies and snacks and pre-packaged them in easy accessible baggies so we dont
waste.
Going alongside with that is we are brown bagging it - boring, yes... but sooo sooo SO cheap!
Going alongside with that is we are brown bagging it - boring, yes... but sooo sooo SO cheap!
We switched up when we pay
certain bills. A lot of them were at the end of the month leaving us
sweating. We moved up a lot of the bills to the beginning of the month
and so far it's working.
We set up 3 month, 6 month
and 1 year goals for our savings account to make it grow.
And the single most
important thing we did to help our finances? We gave ourselves an allowance.
This allowance is for 2 weeks. We have to make $100 (each) last for
two weeks. This means I can use my $100 on anything I want, coffee, make
up, clothes, movies, lunch etc. But if I blow my $100 before the 2 weeks
are up - that's my prob. I've never put myself on a budget... That sounds
kind of crazy to say but I havent. We are going to have weekly budget
meetings to keep each other straight.
I am super excited to see
how we are going to be able to improve our financial lives together. I
want to be debt free in 3 years (excluding mortgage and student loans) but I
feel like if we stick to our plan, it can happen easy!
I feel like I have to make
it into a game or else I am going to loose my mind since I love to shop and
spend. So I am putting together a list of things to do instead of spend.
- Go for a walk
- Sit down and read one of
the 40 books you've gotten recently
- Make some homemade bread
- Go to the zoo with
Vincent
- Go to the Library
- Go to the DIA
- Clean out your
closet
- Write in your journal
- Go for a drive and blast
some music
- Meditate
I am excited for this
journey. Here's to being debt free!
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