I Think It's Working....

One of my New Year's "resolutions" was to start living debt free. We started following Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover sometime in January. Can I just say what a pain in the arse it was the first couple of weeks? Seriously, I thought I was going to throw in the towel several times. It was hard. I like my check card! I like spending money willy-nilly! Zero-based budgeting just sucks!

January and the early part of February were financially tough for us. We, thankfully, did not have any new credit card debts coming in, although our credit cards certainly came and the credit card companies certainly expected to be paid. Imagine that! lol. Anyway, on top of our regular bills and debts, we had Maddy's school tution, we had her application fees for Kindergarten (just to apply, not necessarily a guarantee she'd be in ) and we also had to leave a good sized check to cover "other expenses" with the school if she did get in. This, we were told, wouldn't be cashed in unless she was accepted at the school and we accepted the admissions. But, we needed the check at the time of registration. Robin hates writing checks if the money's not there (duh! ;0) and so we had to tighten our budget to accomodate that. Then we had the boys' preschool registration and their first month's tution to pay. Add to that all the other bills, groceries etc...holy moly. I'm surprised we made it out ahead of the game!

Here's what we did to make it through the past couple of months in the black. We cut our cable down to the most basic Robin would go for. We saved over $30/month on that alone. I cancelled our Netflix subscription because really, we weren't using it. That's another $15/month gone. I watched the grocery fliers for the best deals on fruits, veggies, yogurt and milk and shop according to a really strict list every week (I just restock perishables, pantry items and meats I shop for at the commissary once every four to six weeks). I have cooked from scratch with only one night of take out since we started (Valentines...which was a bust anyway: read about it here). I even started using my bread machine more often to bake bread to go with our soups or stews when I would normally run to the grocery store, or worse, Panera Bread (which is so darn good!) and buy a loaf. I have also stopped being so spontaneous with purchases. For example, I really wanted to register Maddy for her dance class one week, but we just didn't have the money in the budget. Well, we did but it was really tight. We talked about it and decided to chance waiting it out another week. Thankfully, there were still some spots open and we paid in cash for it. Now that felt nice!

Both Robin and I have taken our lunches to work and if we chose to eat out at work, it came out of our weekly fun money allocation. We use our fun money at our discretion. Neither of us is accountable to the other for that money. And, we started using cash for everything except for gas. We use our check cards for that, but we only fill up to the amount we've allocated for that week. If we need more, we juggle other parts of our budget so we don't go over. If we notice that consistantly we're underbudgeting that, we make adjustments to our overall budget the following week.

It's gotten to be a great bonding experience for the two of us. We're united in this and it feels good to be on the same page. We discuss what we need and how much it may cost. Even with all the extra expenses these past six or so weeks, we have more than half our mortgage money set aside, our savings account is growing and our Emergency Fund is almost fully funded. I suspect next week we should have a fully funded Emergency Fund. As we were finishing up our weekly budget meeting, Robin turned to me and said "Wow...I think this is really working! We have money now!" I feel so proud of the work we've done! Yay!