So most of you know that Cody is military- so that covers 100% of all of our bills. I have broken down a budget on what we spend on our every day things, bills that remain relatively the same and then I took our max on the floating bills and inflated them a little so we have some wiggle room. The only thing that I didnt put in our bills under his pay would be the child care expenses and extra gas (since I work these are the bills that my money goes towards, if I didnt work they wouldnt exist). I, Jessica, also work full time and make a pretty good salary, that pays for child care, car expenses and other fun things that we get to do.
Luckily we have been pretty good with our money (some financial set backs before we got married but we took care of them with a hit to my credit). When Cody was in training we lived with family so we could save money there, I also put away as much as I could so that we had money to move and get settled with. The military will pay to move you, however you have to pay all the money upfront and they will reimburse you at a rate... so depending on how frugal you are you can end up making some money for it. All of the "extra" saved money that we had after being paid off we splurged a little but we made certain we had a savings account for emergency money.
Once I started working the budget got a little more loose, however more money was being put away/paying off debt. Our financial statement is that if we dont have the money for it, we dont buy it. We have 3 credit cards, one with the military and 2 with our bank. However only one of them currently holds a balance. We will not allow our selves to put anything on them that we can not pay off if we have to. Our savings account has grown and is looking pretty good, we are half way to our goal, not too shabby. I want us to have at least 3 months of living expenses, how we currently live, in our savings... so roughly $10,000.00. Now some may think that's a lot of money, when you have rent and food and all your bills it goes very quickly when no money is coming into the house.
The only "large" debt we have is Cody's car payment. So now that we are down to 1 credit card balance around $300.00- easily payable, we can start to make double payments on the car.
For the longest time I thought that having a running balance on a credit was good, I could show that I could make the minimum payment every month and I would be fine. The problem with thinking this way is that you get another card and say oh well I can pay the minimum on this one too.... Then the interest charges occur, what some done understand that you get charged interest on the card which makes the balance go up, you next interest fee goes off of the current balance... now you are paying interest charges for the previous interest charge. Something so little can take so long to pay off due to interest and minimum payments. The best thing to do is to pay what you can over the minimum payment, if you pay an extra 5.00 on your minimum that will go towards the interest that you owe. If you can pay off the card/loan at the end of every month so that you dont pay any interest.
Our new found philosophy about living with in our means, means that we have more money to spend. No we arent making anymore money then we were but we are always cutting the bills out that we dont need and in return we have more money. Its easy and simple, yes credit cards and loans are easy to fall on when you are stuck in hard times. However they shouldn't always be there for your every day needs.
I broke our budget down onto a spread sheet. I has on it what bills are paid which paychecks and what will be remaining. That way when payday comes around I immediately go and pay all of the bills for that check, mark them off on the spread sheet and what is left over is what we have to spend for our every day needs. If we want something that we can not afford that paycheck we save it and say next paycheck we should have more left over and wait until we have enough (with out taking from savings) and make the wanted purchase.
Now that our family is living with less debt we feel a lot more free to splurge on the things we want over having no money left over in the end... It was hard at first to tighten down the budget and stop spending on the cards no connected to our bank account. However if you want to it is possible.
Thanks!
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