It is hard to believe we are in July already! The month of June flew past and since May was spend money hand over fist month, we declared June no spend month. The idea was simply to get back on track with our goal of becoming debt free and to see if we could last a month without spending on unnecessary things. We weren’t 100% successful but overall we did extremely well.
I managed to get a FREE haircut (except tip) and FREE brow arch (except tip), which I was very excited about. (If anyone can score free highlights for me I’d love to hear how!) I also spent $10 at Old Navy on the $2 tank top sale. We bought the nicer patio umbrella at Rite Aid that was $7.49 after coupon. So we spent $17.49 extra but I returned a prior purchase of $16.92 so technically it was almost a wash.
Now we are back on track for July and we are 73% of the way to our goal of 6 months expenses in savings. Although we follow Dave Ramsey, we personally don’t feel comfortable with just $1000 in savings. Considering our electric bill alone was $687 this month, we rearranged the baby steps and are saving 6 months and then we will pay off the last bit of my student loan.
I also finally got in gear and opened an ING account for our newborn. We take all the cash gifts she gets from relatives throughout the year and it all goes directly into her college account.
We are on track to have the fully funded emergency account by October 1st. If we stay on track we will have the last bit of my student loans paid off in April and we will be completely debt free except the house.
And how about you? We are halfway through the year already- are you on track with your goals? Hearing about your progress always keeps me motivated!
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Well I wanted to try and stick to $35/week or $140 total for June despite the new baby- but we went over. I was pretty sure I would since we now have the added expense of baby formula- which I have thankfully been scoring deals on left and right!
So I came out at $173 or $33 over budget- but that includes at least 6 packs of Huggies/Pampers and about 11 cans of Similac/Enfamil and Good Start formula. Before I started couponing we spent a whopping $20-25 per can on formula and went through about 2 a week! So I am extremely pleased with this month despite going over. (Note: I include everything in this budget- cleaning supplies, toiletries, groceries, dog food etc..)
We have decided to increase the budget a little bit for July and see what happens. I am going to shoot for $40/week or $160 total.
Funny when my husband and I were single, we used to spend $600/month on groceries alone. I can’t even imagine how we could possibly have spent so much!
One note is that I have been using coupons and watching sales long enough to have a fairly decent stockpile. For example, we have enough toiletries and cleaning products on hand to allow me to wait until I can pay virtually nothing for these types of items. This is a huge help in stretching our dollars from week to week.
And how about you? How did your month go?
Did you catch my post
here about our no spend challenge month? We decided to cut out all extra spending this month as we had so many unexpected expenses in May. My husband and I do this every so often when we have gotten off track of our goal to become totally debt free.
The perimeters of the challenge are simple, we only spend money on regular monthly bills. The only extra we allotted was a haircut for my husband. We also have
$140 budgeted for groceries- but considering we have a new baby that needs formula I am expecting we will need to increase our budget.
How have we done thus far? EXCELLENT! It has been tough but we are right on track. We spent a tiny amount on supplies for our
renovation from Home Depot- but we dug up an old receipt my husband didn’t use a coupon on and got enough cash back to cover the purchase.
Also, I have desperately needed a haircut for awhile. I got a FREE haircut from a posh salon by being on their mailing list. Whoo hoo! I did tip $10 but my husband got a $10 tip earlier in the week so technically it was a wash. We also budgeted his haircut for this month at $15 but I found a coupon for $5.99 so that also offset the cost of my cut.
I had a hard time passing up these
crocs (I think the deal is still going). I also had a few gifts to purchase this month- fortunately I had planned ahead with my
gift closet and have all but one taken care of.
Is anyone else challenging themselves this month? What has been the hardest part for you?
anthonyimages
Last month we got hit with a big bill that prevented us from adding anything to our savings account and this month it still feels like the unexpected keeps on coming.
We had more little expenses that added up fast with car registration, hospital bills (from having a healthy baby girl), we spent $200 on an emergency breast pump (don’t ask), not to mention starting our mini renovation and the list goes on and on. We normally budget $100 for miscellaneous expenses and this month all those little things added up to $1300! OUCH! Since we moved to California a year ago, I am still amazed at how expensive the cost of living is here. Even with moderate usage, our utility bills alone can get as high as $500 in the summer. We also have a pool for the first time and had no idea how expensive it would be to maintain.
I know some people are able to pay cash for a home (Money Saving Mom is a great example of this) and I always hear people on Dave’s show that are debt free including the house- I wonder if this is possible in a super high cost of living area like CA?
The good news is we paid cash for everything and we had fully expected this month to be a financial challenge and we were prepared. I am amazed at how much we were able to add to savings even with the extra expenses.
So we are now 66% of the way to our goal of 6 months of expenses in savings. I am extremely anxious to finish this so we can start tackling the last student loan. Once that is finished we will be totally debt free except the house.
To get ourselves back on track after a lot of spending in May, we have declared June no spend month. We have done no spend months in the past as a way to start fresh and refocus on our goals and it has always been effective for us. So for June we intend to eliminate all extra spending entirely. We will have our regular monthly bills, gas and grocery budget and the only “extra” will be a haircut for my husband.
If you are curious about doing your own No Spend month -check out Amy’s No Spend Challenge. I will keep you posted weekly with our progress- we have a lot of graduations, birthdays etc.. coming up so it should be interesting to see if we can stay on track.
I will post updates as the month progresses and let you know how we are doing with our challenge. I would love to hear how you are progressing with your goals as well! It definitely keeps me motivated to hear other people’s successes.
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This month we went over our $140 budget again. I have not been much of an example the last 2 months but honestly I am not that upset about it.
We were officially over $71.71 however I had $27.95 in rebates which I add back into the budget
making us $43.95 over. This month, I included a lot of extras in the grocery budget- postage, (2) printer ink refills, expensive carpet cleaner, diapers for the new baby, 3 large cans of formula and 2 jugs of ready to feed formula. This is quite a bit for $43.95! We also had a few medications and supplies I needed after the baby was born which are included in the $43 amount.
I fully expected to need to increase the budget in the event that we had to supplement with formula as it is a big drain on the budget. So overall I am happy with how the month turned out. We still have a very full pantry and I am hoping we have enough diapers for both little ladies to make it through June.
I am going to continue with $140/month or $35/wk into June and see what happens. I expect to spend about $15/week on formula now so I want to see how far I can stretch our dollars. Plus we have been eating a lot more convenience foods in the last few weeks of my pregnancy so I want to add a lot more fresh produce back in. We will likely need to increase the budget to $50/week but I will see how things go and make the decision in July.
While our financial goals and budget are extremely important to me, we also try to be flexible as life happens. I am happy to adjust our spending according to our family’s needs and a healthy pregnancy was the most important thing in May. It was also important to me to be very prepared for baby- with lots of wipes, diapers etc.. and I am pleased I got some incredible deals this month (here, here, & here).
How did your month go? I’d love to hear what your budget is and how you are progressing with your goals!
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So lemmee see. This is the spring of procrastination and I fully intend to get it in gear sometime.
As you know, this is month #2 of unemployment and Baby #2 is due anytime. We have had a lot of bills sneak up on us this month so two steps forward and one step back.
Apparently we didn’t receive the notices for our Homeowner’s Insurance renewal (not good when your insurance company has the wrong address) so we had 72 hours to pay over $1100. Thank goodness we are not living paycheck to paycheck anymore as this was a headache due to the short notice, but nothing we needed to panic about. This reduced the amount that we planned to put into savings but at least it is done for another year.
We plan to start adding $100 extra per month to our
ING account that we use for property taxes so that we have the money set aside annually for this bill and it doesn’t sneak up again.
So here is how the month ended:
1. Save 6 months of expenses in Emergency Fund. We are flat at 56% due to the homeowners insurance and other bills.
2. Enroll in life insurance for me- I have been procrastinating on this because I hate to have more expenses when we are working so hard to save!
3. Cash only spending. Flunked this as I lost my debit card and never did get cash out. We overspent by $7 on the grocery budget due to using a credit card (gasp!) I have already pulled cash out for May and I am determined to stay on track with this. For me it isn’t the $7 but more the principle of staying on a budget.
4. Save money for renovation. We completed one small project by using coupons such as
this at Home Depot and selling a few things on Craigslist. We are planning to enclose our playroom loft to a 4th bedroom this summer so there is a lot more Craiglisting that needs to be done!
We are hopeful that we can finish Goal #1 by September. I can’t wait to start tackling the remains of my grad school loans which will be our final step in becoming debt free. We are deviating a bit from Dave’s program, but with one income and 2 babies, we feel better having the extra money in savings right now.
Also I contacted our mortgage company after reading
this great post by Meredith. Our mortgage is currently at 5.75% and after applying for the 123 Refinance program it looks like we might be able to secure 5.0% with no points or fees. We have our fingers crossed that the final paperwork comes through soon as this will reduce our payments by $200/month. If we continue to pay the same payment we will go from a 30 yr mortgage to a 20 yr mortgage. We are still deciding if we want to put the monthly savings into our debt snowball or if we want to continue with the same payments and reduce the life of the mortgage. Apparently we can try to get even lower than 5.0% but we are happy with this refi as we will pay nothing out of pocket.
For April we decided to raise our budget from $30/week to $35/week for a few reasons:
1. We had a lot of company planned in April
2. We are expecting baby #2 in May and I wanted to stockpile quick meals and extras for the new baby.
3. We dramatically reduced our budget in March from $50 to $30 while we were waiting for unemployment to kick in, once it did we were able to add back a few extras.
So how did the $35/week work? Well I am sorry to say we went over by $7! We were actually over a little more than that but I got a few rebate checks that offset the difference. I am really irritated that we went over and can pin that on one thing- laziness.
We used credit cards this month rather than our cash system. I lost my debit card early in the month and have been using the credit card in the meantime. We decided last month my husband would be responsible for getting cash out monthly and he just didn’t get around to it. (Can you tell I’m irritated?) My husband was also in charge of keeping track of how much I spent and as credit cards don’t always post transactions in a timely manner- we had extra transactions came through late.
So we both learned a lesson from the experience- we haven’t had any credit card debt in years and I can see how easy it would be to sink back into the hole! I found with many of my transactions I sort of noticed the total but didn’t really absorb how much I spent. I did a lot of tiny purchases this month and $1 here, $6 there seems so insignificant until you get the bill and realize you spent way more than you thought!
When I have cash in an envelope every time I open it up I can see the amount dwindling and I think I am a lot more careful. I am also more aware of how much I am actually spending- taking the extra seconds to actually count cash makes it really sink in what you have spent.
So now what? We paid the stupid credit card bill immediately of course. I am 100% anti-credit cards and you will never see anything on my blog that recommends using these cards for the cash back offers or whatever. It is too easy to get caught in the trap and pay fees or ring up a balance you can’t pay off. I was once charged $35 for paying my balance early! (Seriously I received a late fee for paying the balance before the 21 day period started- not including the interest rate hike from 6% to 29%!) I know a lot of people make the bonus work for them, but for us it just doesn’t work.
I also went straight to the bank and got out cash for May. No excuses. I decided to stick with $35/week- but deducted the amount we went over ($7) off the top- so rather than $140 this month I have $133. Fortunately CVS is opening in late May and I am hoping that will help with our budget.
So the moral of the story is, you really need to figure out what works for you and stick to it! In our case a cash only system is the easiest way to ensure I stick to my budget.
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You have heard me talk about Dave Ramsey here and here. We are big followers of his program and are diligently working to become debt free.
Tonight he is hosting a special event called Townhall for Hope. He will be discussing the economy, the recession, the housing market and much more. You can click here to find a FREE venue near you or just tune in to the Fox Business Channel to catch the entire 3 hr program. Dave will spend an hour answering questions and it should be an informative evening.
I listen to Dave’s tv show every night and his folksy approach to finances makes the hour pass really quickly. If you are struggling to get control of your finances, facing a lot of consumer debt or just want to try and do a little better I highly recommend getting on board with his program!
I suggest getting started by getting Dave’s book Total Money Makeover to learn about his debt free program and how to get started gaining control over your money. You can check his book out at the library or purchase it at Amazon here for $9 used and $14 new. (Do you have Swagbucks to cash in yet?)
Once you are on the program, his book Financial Peace Revisited is a great second step and can be purchased at Amazon for $7.73 used or $15 new by clicking here.
Do I have any readers that are on Dave’s program? I’d love to hear where you are at and if you plan to attend/watch the event tonight.
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anthonyimages
This month we went over our $140 budget again. I have not been much of an example the last 2 months but honestly I am not that upset about it.
