It's Friday

which means it's budget day in our household. Robin and I get paid on alternating weeks, so thankfully, there's always a paycheck coming in on Friday. It's such a crazy thing to watch the amount of money you have in your account quickly dwindle to nothing when you have to pay all your bills, get groceries and try (key word is try) to put some away in savings.

Today's budget discussions were straight-forward but depressing. We had to make sure we had our mortgage money set aside, money for stupid bills (I consider cable a "stupid bill" because I'd be happy to not have it; Robin disagrees) and for automatic withdrawls like life insurance, which, while necessary, eat a lovely chunk of our budget each month. We also have our sitter's weekly pay. That along with gas is the one that stings just a little more than the others. I love our sitter. She's fantastic and deserves every penny she earns watching my children. I never feel concern when I leave them with her and they love to go, but when I calculate that her pay is roughly the same as my mortgage every month, I cringe.

Gas, in the past two weeks has gone up over fourty cents per gallon. It makes me ill to think how much higher the price will go and how much more we'll have to pinch our pennies to try and get ahead even just a little.

We've been sitting down for our weekly budget meeting for a little over a year now. As much as today's session bummed me out (partially because we were unable to put some money aside for our floors and other "wants"), this is something I look forward to each Friday. I look forward to seeing progress on our bills. I enjoy seeing how far we've come in a year. We could have been in a much worse position right now if we hadn't come to our senses and started talking about money instead of burying our heads in the sand and pretend our finances were honky dorey. They're not awful, but there is room to make improvement. We've worked really hard this past year and I feel better about where we stand. We'll have a credit card paid off by the summer and then we'll attack our other debts. Hopefully soon, we can start seeing greater rewards for all our hard work.