Practice What I Preach

Just about a year ago, my husband and I announced that we were consumer debt free!  The only debt we held, at the time, was a student loan (that I swear will never be fully paid off!).  Anyway, since last April we relaxed a bit with the budgeting, what a BIG mistake.

We have acquired $1500 in credit card debt (I know, right!  I feel horrible.), and we now also have our mortgage (which feels GREAT!).

Each month I keep thinking to myself, "where is all the money going?"....so, I finally decided to practice what I preach.  I worked to organize the last 6 months of our expenses into categories to see what we were ACTUALLY spending....nearly fainted at the numbers, and then created a plan.

The crazy thing?  During this period of time of little to no tracking of our expenses, I was creating these actual spending sheets and budgets for friends and family!  How hypocritical of me, I should have been on top of our spending before giving other people advice.

Anyway, thankfully we are back on track and have a plan to repay all debt by the end of the year, and I have been EXTREMELY diligent with tracking our spending since my initial discovery of our finances last week.

Does your family budget?  Do you need help setting up a budget?  I hope be happy to help.  Simply e-mail me @ jennifer.overy@gmail.com and I will either do it for you (obviously with your involvement), or guide you in setting up the tracking sheet, creating a debt reduction timeline, and a monthly budget.

What are your financial goals?

Frustrating Background Information

Okay, so I am feeling a little overwhelmed with managing our budget....and I think the biggest area that I need to work on is including my husband in ALL bill payments and spending. I almost feel as if he blames me for wasting his hard earned paycheck. Yes, I do spend a little frivolously. (Example: Yesterday I spend less than $4 on lunch while I was out shopping. This will probably be the only (hopefully!) frivolous spending, for me, with this current paycheck.) But, not to the extent that he thinks I do. Although, I could be totally off base, I tend to over-think EVERYTHING.

Sorry, I just had to vent a little bit to get that off my chest. I would like to introduce myself and my family. My name is Jenn, I am 22 years old and have been married for a little over a year. My husband Zach is 24 years old, and works from home for an alarm company. It is a nice job with a lot of perks. We have a beautiful (almost) 7 month old son, and another on the way.

My husband and I have been working on our debt since the beginning of the year, and so far we are doing better than I expected. We started off 2009 with approximately $52,000 worth of debt, and now we have $35,862.91 (as of 6/13/09) worth of debt. This means we have paid off $16,137.09 of our debt in the last 5 months. Don't ask me how we are doing this, because I honestly don't know. I do know that the largest payoff was with our income tax return back in February (Sorry I don't remember the exact amount...less than $5,000 for sure).

I am going to post our monthly budget in another blog post, here. This will give you a break down of our spending and total debt. If you have any suggestions I would love the feedback.