When we were driving to AZ over Thanksgiving, we listened to a lot (LOT) of Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman – that is a LONG DRIVE – among other podcasts. We are truly pretty good with money and for the most part always have been, thanks largely in part to my fiscally conservative upbringing and personal OCDish tendencies. We use credit cards only for convenience and points and we pay them off every month. We save for rainy days, college and retirement FIRST, before we even think about luxuries. We budget and save for big purchases. We know what kind of life insurance to buy and have good estate planning in place.
But we were far from perfect and we are certainly not doing as well as we could be. We could have been putting more money into paying off our mortgage early, or more into retirement and college savings. We should have been working harder to stick to our monthly budget (noun – a document with fictitious allotments for our monthly income that we never ever actually hit). To be perfectly honest, we just weren’t really paying a lot of attention to what we spent and we made dumb excuses about spending it.
So for the past two months, we’ve been really buckling down on hitting our budget numbers. It’s been a good exercise for me to do this weekly (usually on Sunday) instead of whenever the heck I get around to it (i.e. once a month or so) and instead of me doing most of this in a bubble, I’ve been involving Matt more. We’ve been a lot more careful with how often we eat out and how much we allow ourselves to spend when we do so. Fortunately, splitting a meal behooves our waistlines as much as it behooves our bottom line, a win-win.
Cooking at home is a big part of that too. Of course we’ve been pretty good for years about cooking at home most weeknights, but things get a little dicey when we’re out and about so much during the week with kid activities or on the weekends when we’re again out and about. And it all went absolutely to heck when we were commuting back to our own suburb from the rental house.
So we’ve redoubled our efforts. All this has really meant is bit more discipline- more planning ahead to make sure we have leftovers and options for breakfast and lunch and quick dinners for crazy nights – and reminding ourselves that there’s good food at home to eat for (usually) a fraction of the cost and that it’s OK to be hungry for the 20-30 minutes it takes us to get home from lessons. It’s also cut down at least some on our food waste.
It hasn’t always been 100% smooth sailing of course, but we’ve been pretty good about defaulting to things we have on hand like sandwiches and quesadillas and not using it as an excuse to order up pizza.
Thanks to these, and other “sacrifices” we had money leftover in December (probably a first) and even more in January. It is good to see these fairly small changes having an effect on our bank account. It’s one of the areas we feel like we were forced to give up some control when the kids were small just to keep our heads above water. And now they’re older, more self-sufficient and we’re getting them back. I’m a fan.