It's time to come clean....I am totally addicted to this site. It's been real slow here at work. Real estate isn't real busy towards the end of the year on top of a bad market. Anyways, I'm on this site all day doing freebies, putting in my 2 cents, asking questions, finding information. This site in an absolute blessing.
DH wasn't feeling well last night so we didn't get to the budget...but he did promise me this morning we'd do it tonight. We're also going to put together our debts for the Dave Ramsey payoff method. I haven't decided if we should use the envelope method or not. We get pretty debit card happy so I was trying to figure out a way to stop that, but I am horrible with cash. If I have it I'll spend it. I don't know what to do besides gain some self-disipline. Is there anything y'all do to keep yourself from spending? New Years is coming up fast and I need to get some realistic financial resolutions together quick. 2008 is going to be a good one.
I'm addicted
December 28th, 2007 at 06:25 pm
December 28th, 2007 at 06:31 pm 1198866713
December 28th, 2007 at 06:32 pm 1198866751
Number two is, for things that are nonessential, instead of buying it right away, I'll put the item on a "someday/maybe" list, and I give myself a mandatory cooling off period when I'm not allowed to buy the item. Only when the item has been on the someday/maybe list for a while and I still want to buy it just as much do I ever allow myself to buy things. I do most of my shopping online for everything except food and hardware, and mostly at Amazon.com, so I just put items in either the shopping cart/then move it to "save it for later" or in the Wish List, depending on just how much I want the item at the moment I see it. While I still *do* buy things, I only buy less than a tenth of the stuff that I put in the cart, that, in my former spendier life, I would have bought right away. (And for a lot of items, I can often get the item used at a cheaper price doing it this way.)
December 28th, 2007 at 06:44 pm 1198867483
You can turn that off by posting a [/u] somewhere in one of your blogs.
Okay. So, I'm with you on the cash deal. It just disappears. So I give us an allowance. When that cash is gone - TOO BAD SO SAD, it's over until the next Friday's allowance.
For other things I've been there too on the debit card happy. Here's where a good working spending plan comes in handy. If you have a FUNDED category for it in the budget, you can use the debit card up to that amount and then NO MORE. It's over until next month.
We use YouNeedABudget.com to track out our budgeting.
December 28th, 2007 at 10:56 pm 1198882617
We get cash allowances every Friday; it used to be whatever we had left over, but now that we're doing better, we each get $60 per week. If someone absolutely needs to use their debit card for something, they give me the money later or I take it out of their next week's allowance. If there's something we all want, I add it as a line item and we save gradually till we can afford it.
The only thing we're allowed to use debit cards for unreservedly is groceries/household. I can tell which purchases those are because we go to one of six stores for those purchases. I set aside a fixed amount every two weeks in checking. If we go over, I just subtract from the next two weeks' amount; if we stay under, I add the extra to the next two weeks.
December 31st, 2007 at 02:16 am 1199067399