BUDGETING!
(Warning- Dead boring for those not interested in budgeting...)
While at Notre Dame, I read the Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I was hooked, devoted and convinced at once that we need to get rid of our debt by using his method. It makes so much sense! His method involves paying off your smallest debt first by any means you can. Pick up a paper route, babysit, anything extra. Avoid more debt like crazy, and then put anything extra you've earned on that smallest loan. And then once it's paid off you take that monthly payment and add that to your next smallest loan. It's called the snowball effect and you can buy the book here. It makes more sense than that muddled explanation I just gave you. Lohn wasn't totally convinced on Ramsey's method at first. He thought we should pay off the loan with the highest interest rate first. So being the number cruncher he is, he calculated the difference if we paid an extra $25 a month on our smallest loan using Ramsey's method, and paying an extra $25 on our loan with the highest interest rate. He was really surprised that Dave's method was better. Just by paying an extra $25 a month on our smallest student loan and then snowballing it, we will pay off our loans a year early and save over $11,000.
This was good and I was really excited to get started, but after our move to VA, I felt like it was nearly impossible to hold onto the money we were making. It got slippery, and I didn't know where my money was going. I was trying to budget by the month, but come the last week in the month, I had no money left, we desperately needed food, so I went shopping and went over budget. Every. Single. Time. I got frustrated with it. I tried couponing and shopping for deals, but it wan't enough either. Then a few months ago, I found this site on Pinterest, and it has helped us budget SO much. I highly recommend it. The difference is that Lohn and I now budget by the week, not the month, and there is no borrowing from the next week. And instead of there being 5 days at the end of the month with no food, we just have about one day a week that we have to be creative with what food we have. That is doable. And we have been doing great. I do it different than this lady though. I print up the paper with our weekly budget and tape it to our wall by our bedroom door where Lohn and I see it everyday and record our expenses on it. And I honestly feel so much better knowing where my money is going. I am learning to say "We don't need that right now," and we are learning to do without. I am learning to make more foods from scratch and learning what good deals are at the grocery store and taking advantage of them. So check her out if you are interested in budgeting better. It is worth it, I promise. Good luck!
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