How do I fight it? I look back and see how much ground we have made. We have come so far in such a short amount of time. Sacrifices have been made, possessions sold, and simpler living has come our way. Forget about blow money, we blow it before we get it based on our budget. Our budget has seriously taken a backseat as of late, pretty much non-existent since starting this second job. Our bills are being paid, but anything left over does not get allotted to where it needs to be. Something always seems to come up that wasn’t planned for or goes over the budgeted allotment.

I had to replace the fluorescent lights in our kitchen recently and they are the not the inexpensive 4ft shop lights or the small bulbs that are in your standard lamp. These are the U-shaped bulbs that cost $12.99 a piece. I replaced one and all was well for a few days, then it began to flicker and would not turn on. I removed the housing and noticed the bulb that I had not replaced was dark around the ends and decided to replace it. $25 spent, not accounted for in a budget. A vet visit, eating out, a run to the store for X,Y,Z. Ugh

The month is still young and it is time to get back on track. Back to the plasectomy and a budgeted life.

In our home we follow a zero dollar based budget, something we have never done until the start of this year. I have detailed in the past how this is going for us and it continues to get better. The first month there were fights over the money and where it should go, extremely stressful. The second month, less stress and we worked through it, but rocky still. This month it did take us a couple of days to complete the entire month, have the plan for our money and we still fell a little short of funds. The shortage is being resolved by selling items on a large auction site and free classified ads. This has helped us out and gave a much needed “phew, we made it.” Of course when next month rolls around we will probably be in the same situation.

One of the tools we use is the online gazelle budgeting software available from the Total Money Makeover website. We had received a 30 day free trial during a promotional period from purchasing one of the Dave Ramsey products and gave the tool a try. It has a very clean, easy wizard approach to help creating that first budget and maintaining it. There is also a lite version of the gazelle budget software available here to try out which works as well, but lacks the wizard walk through and the breakdown of your payees. It does cost to be member of the Total Money Makeover website at $9.95 a month to get the complete online budget software and it may be of value to you. The membership does also include access to podcasts of his radio show, community forums, but I mainly use it for the software at the moment. I really like that I can access it at home, work or any location with internet access if need be. However, at $10 a month that money may be better suited for my plasectomy so I have started to use a free alternative that I like very much and considering moving to entirely.

A superb free option to the online software is available from the Enemy of Debt website and can be found here. They were extremely generous in offering this tool free as it very well laid out, direct and easy to use. If you are familiar with the Dave Ramsey plan or simply need a FANTASTIC zero dollar based spreadsheet I highly recommend the one over at Enemy Of Debt. It auto calculates, gives percentages of your income in each category, and has a tab for the lump sum saving that needs to be done throughout the year for items such as furniture, Christmas shopping, saving for auto repair, home repair, etc.

Try it and let me know what you think or what you are currently using.

This is something we have been trying to accomplish since January. January we failed miserably, this month we are doing better, next month I believe will be even better. Why is this? I wish I could say it was because we are running a very well oiled machine of a budget, ha, far from it. It is mainly due to the tax refunds as of late that have relieved some of the financial stress. We were running a short fall of about $550 a month for everything we were trying to plan for. Furniture, Vacation, Entertainment, Dining Out, Christmas Gifts, Blow money, Car Repair, etc… Unfortunately some of those extra items needed to be put off until they could be affordable and work with the budget. The tax refunds we received this month have helped out tremendously. We eliminated 3 cards and dropped those payments which have saved us $257 a month. That in combination with not lump sum saving for everything under the sun brought our short fall down to $273.

This is where it truly gets hard. We don’t have enough for a debt snowball towards our plasectomy and do not have enough to cover all our bases as we would like. All the plan is right now is to get our budget to zero dollars. Essentially what needs to go are the wanted extras; no new furniture, minimal vacations, no saving for Christmas currently and make the needed reductions in the other categories until it can be budgeted and still make progress towards our debt.

What are we going to do?

• Eliminate the savings of $50 a month for furniture, in the red $223.
• Christmas gifts were going to be purchased with cash of $1,200 saved throughout the year. Right now, this doesn’t fit in the budget, another $100 saved. In the red $123.
• Reduce Entertainment to $50 from $100. In the red $73.
• Eliminate the restaurant budget, another $50 saved. In the red $23.

I haven’t quite figured out where the remaining $23 shortfall is going come from. I do know we need more income in order to make this budget work harder for our money.

Let me share with you things that we found and other ideas to stop the leaking from your wallet.

1. Scale the cable service back or get rid of it entirely.
Did that free promotion of HBO end? How much does your bill run? $80, $100, or $150 a month? Watch for those promotions on TV where you could combine your services. Give your local provider a call and threaten to cancel. You would be amazed at how quick they will offer to lower your rates to keep you as a customer. We recently did this and brought our internet service down from $44.95 a month to $29.95 a month for a year.

2. Cell Phone
Take a look at your monthly minute usage, text messaging, and premium services. Are you paying for insurance at $5 or $6 month on a phone that is 2 years old? Have an old phone sitting in a drawer? Use that if something were to happen to your current phone. Reduce your minute plan if you are not using all the minutes an instant savings of $20. Check to see if you have an employer discount. You could save as much as 22% of your service.
• Verizon Wireless – Dial #646 to check your minutes. Click here to check for employer discounts.
• AT&T – Dial #646 to check your minutes. Click here to check for employer discounts.
• Sprint – Click here to check for employer discounts.

3. Sell Your Storage Unit
Do you have a bunch of stuff? Does your stuff charge you rent? Have you visited your stuff recently? Your stuff doesn’t miss you and you will not miss it. Sell it! Apply your cash to your plasectomy. Two great avenues to get rid of your stuff is to sell it on eBay and Craigslist. For those items that are rare I would personally choose to sell on eBay as you have a global customer base. Craigslist is fantastic for local selling saving you on shipping and it’s free to post. We just sold several small kitchen appliances generating over $100 from Craigslist

4. Gym Membership
Bally’s Total Fitness, Gold’s Gym, 24 Hour Fitness are you a member to one of these chains? What does it run you? A few hundred a year? Have you tried your local YMCA/YWCA? What about running in your local neighborhood? It is still technically winter, but spring is right around the corner and it’s free.

5. Cut Your Electricity Usage
Are you using compact fluorescent bulbs in all lights in your home? Do you know how much electricity is being used by your computer, tv, dvd player, etc? If not, I would highly recommend purchasing a Kill A Watt meter to determine how much your idle electronics are costing you. By using this tool I have my computer that I was leaving on 24/7 was costing me $12-14 a month. That is over $150 a year.

Are you doing anything to stop the budget leaks in your home? Will the money you save by stopping these leaks be applied to your plasectomy or appropriated somewhere else?

An article on Yahoo Finance explores this idea and I do agree with some points of the article, but overall I find that it supports the use of a credit card and not the use of cash. At one point in the article it states this:

“Here are a couple of big ones: Who wants to walk around with $10,000 in their pocket to pay for a home-theater system or even $500 for a new suit, shoes and accessories?”

Uh, hello? There is this thing called a debit card. Yeah, it may be a little inconvenient to save that money for a period of weeks or months, but I bet that new home theater will sound a lot sweeter when their isn’t a minimum payment month after month.

Another point:

“And don’t forget about all the perks that some credit cards offer, like redeemable mileage for air travel, hotel stays or a bevy of discounts. Some will even help pay for prescriptions and other health-related items.”

Perks? Are you serious? Failing to mention that you need to accumulate points, spends $X,XXX.XX amount to redeem those perks. Usually to get that free round trip ticket you need to accumulate 10,000 points. I know there are certain promos where you can double or even triple the amount points you earn per dollar, but come on. Lets say you are earning 3 points for every $1 you spend, you need to spend at least $3,333.33 to get the voucher for the ticket. Keep in mind that some cards have points that will expire and then you are stuck in a perpetual loop of spend, spend, spend for that free ticket. Why not put aside $50 a month to plan for that ticket? Your money is not going to expire the way a point would.

For too too long we have been in a cycle or rampant consumerism with the ease of swiping a credit card. Our economy is in the mess that it is because of this, but let us spend our way out of it.

Why not start your own plasectomy today?

Let me be the first to say that budgeting, really budgeting, is hard. In the past we only cared about what bill had to be paid from our accounts and what was left was ours to spend. There was no planning for an emergency, no lump sum planning, or even a blow money category. It was all blow money once the bills were paid as we saw it. Free to do with what we wished. Not anymore.

We started the envelope system, but are not doing envelopes for every category as some of bills for heating, electricity, and such are paid via our banks bill pay service. Quite frankly this would lead to a major pain in the rear yo withdrawal the money only to turn around and redeposit.

So how did we do? Let us take a look:
Total income this pay period- $1,025
Online Bill Pay
$150 – Groceries (Until 2/2)
$140 – Utilities, Gas
$100 – Utilities, Electric
$53 - Cable/Internet We have basic cable, 14 channels for $16.95( basic cable pending cancellation).
$76 – Bank of America Visa
$118 - Chase Visa
$100 – SallieMae

Envelopes
$35 – Utility, Water (billed quarterly)
$11 - Cell Phone Bill (we do not have a landline)
$49 – Car Payment
$88 – Gas for cars
$20 – Car Repairs
$25 – Clothing
$15 – Doctor/Prescriptions
$10 – Prescriptions
$10 – Toiletries, Haircare, Etc
$25 – Blow the Budget

We have $0.00 left at the end of this budget. Hopefully we will not blow it too badly as this is our first attempt. Wish us luck.

Envelopes and the start to our budget

We are going to get this right. We BLEW it the last paycheck I received. Started off strong , we sat down wrote down our budget, accounted for every dollar, we felt good, we did it without an argument with the help of a glass of wine or two. This was humbling experience. Visually seeing what was coming in and going out makes one realize quickly how we got to where we are today. So, we made a plan for the entire month, or at least we had thought. We wrote out every dollar, anticipated what she would earn and what I would bring home. Well….that is all we did. Old habits die hard, REAL HARD!

No envelope system, no withdrawals of cold hard cash, just our usual going about swiping the debit card. We didn’t eat out at all, but we did run to the store for the “little” things, bread, milk, eggs, etc and the accompanying gas for those little errands. So, what does that do? Even less money for the rest of the month. We are going to revisit the budget this weekend and make a plan for the next 17 days until I get paid again.

Which leads me to this paycheck, I am paid hourly twice a month, the 1st and 15th. I will lay it all out here either later tonight or sometime this weekend once we figure who is going to get paid, partially paid, or not paid at all.