I have been feeling guilty about this…my wife and I have discussed it and came to a conclusion that we love to eat out and I mean love it. Our relationship started by eating out and we both grew fat because of it. Those days are gone and we slimmed back down over the past eight years by making meals, eating healthier, and finding other things to do to help our relationship flourish. Our relationship will grow deeper because of this plasectomy as well. We dug ourselves into this mess and we can dig ourselves out with the plan, only if it is a fine tuned machine though.

This last weekend in January we were weak with our budget. With our first month (January) of trying to plan out our money we honestly thought we could do away with eating out. We almost made it. The realization is we didn’t truly plan for everything. We didn’t plan for the small trips that may have us out at lunch or dinner time. This creates a problem when you have three hungry mouths pecking at you for food. Your sanity can only last for so long with three grumpy kids when they are hungry. In hindsight we should have either forged on or stopped for a snack, instead we decided to visit Wendy’s. It was the first in probably over a month since we had eaten out. Between marching into the last few weeks of the holidays saving and spending money for gifts, the holiday meals with leftovers, and then ultimately being broke after it’s all over there was not a need or the means to eat out. That isn’t to say we have the means now. We basically robbed Peter for instant gratification and something else suffers. This in turn creates a snowball effect where someone or a group is not going to receive their entire amount due. It is a viscous cycle that is brought on by our stupidity and does nothing to advance the plasectomy.

Budget lessoned learned? You need to have blow money for times like these and it needs to be an adequate amount to last the entire month. Self discipline to not blow the budget by blowing the blow money.