Recap on August's Unusual Spending

We did alright estimating August’s unusual spending.

We had to pay $515 for dance fees and registration and that was a killer!!! That paid for tuition for August and September (minus The Girl’s solo fees) and registration for the year. We paid for that out of our yearly expenses account. I’m not super happy the money had to come out of there, but I am super happy that it didn’t have to be put on a credit card. One thing I did not factor in to paying for August was pointe shoes for ballet. Holy cow, those were expensive!!! The Girl is going on pointe for the first time this year and thus needed the shoes. After paying for all the pieces: shoes, ribbons, elastics, and toe protectors (I don’t know the official term) we walked out of the store about $150 poorer. On the plus side, though the expense was not planned for, there was enough money in the “Kids’ Activities” envelope to cover the extra cost.

My dad’s party was a rousing success! I spent a little more than I would have liked out of my own pocket. All the food was paid for by other family members, but I paid for all the decorations and plates and cups. It was a Halloween themed party and we had a lot of decorations already and borrowed a couple of boxes from my dad, but it still wasn’t enough.  I spent $50 at the Dollar Tree on decorations and plates, napkins and silverware. In truth, I probably bought more than I needed, but I wanted to make it special for my dad. He only turns 75 once! Luckily, my house was pretty clean and I had plenty of time to decorate and figure out what kind of decorations we still needed.

It wasn’t too bad of a month, but I’m hoping September is even better!

Still Embarassed

I’m still embarrassed about our debt.

And the more debt I’m in, the more embarrassed I am.  It’s another vicious cycle of debt. And the shame and embarrassment felt from debt you are in is just as crippling as the actual debt itself.

I truly think The Husband and I have a great marriage: we still date, we enjoy doing things together, like grocery shopping and cleaning the house, we enjoy just getting to talk with one another, but I still “hide” our total debt from him.

He knows we have a car payment… but that’s probably about it. He doesn’t know we have over $10000 in credit card debt (though he could easily find out). He doesn’t know we still owe each of our children over $1000. And I want it to stay that way.

I feel like our debt, is my problem. I feel like I got us into this mess, so I can get us out. (That’s not the truth of the matter. We incurred the debt we have together, mostly on home renovations, but some of it was on general overspending.) The problem with all of this is though, that I’m not getting us out. As I mentioned in my last debt progress report, our debt is nearly stagnant.  We are just spending right at, or worse, beyond our means.

Ideally, we would be in this boat together. But the reality is I am in this leaking canoe by myself and trying to plug all the holes with no help from anybody else. I know I should tell my husband where we are at financially and then he would help me to get out of debt. He would 100% be on board with helping me to cut back our spending and stop buying things we don’t need. But if I tell him, I have to admit that I screwed up and that I can’t handle it myself.

I think that, right there, is the reason I’m not more honest with The Husband about our debt. It’s not embarrassment so much as having to admit that I made a mistake, that I did something wrong. I hate that feeling. I want to think that I can do it all and by admitting to The Husband that we fell into debt again, it’s clear that I can’t do it all.

I hate the feelings of shame and inadequacy that debt brings with it. I’m embarrassed by our debt and I hide it from people because I don’t want anyone else to know. But on the flip side, talking about it, or in my case, blogging about it, takes a little of the pressure off. Although no one reads my little blog, just having the chance to get these feelings off of my chest help me to breathe a little easier. Making personal financial goals, and then checking in on them, makes the burden a little lighter.

Until our debt is paid off, I will continue to be embarrassed. I will continue to feel ashamed about the fact that we fell back into debt. And sadly, I will continue to hide our debt from The Husband. That is a horrible, but honest, admission. Knowing what an understanding and wonderful and kind man my husband is, I know he would only encourage me as I tried to get us out of debt, but I can’t bring myself to talk to him about our debt. We talk about everything else, including our finances in general; but I never talk about the fact that we have credit card debt.

I’m hoping this post will help to spur my debt payoff progress. I’m hoping for a lot of progress by the time I post my next debt update. But mostly, I’m hoping to meet the two financial goals I set for myself in my last debt progress report: bringing our credit card down under $9000 after stupid tax and bringing our entire debt total under $20000. Both of these are huge stretch goals, but with No Spend September on the horizon, I’m going to reach for them!

Depressing Debt Totals

Let’s just start with this: our summer was EXPENSIVE! Between buying a new house (and all that entails) and going on vacation, we spent a lot of money. In fact, our debt technically rose in July, but that was only because we were on vacation and I was unable to estimate what our bill would be. (I had the money in the bank to pay for it, I was just waiting to see how much it would be.)

Since we got back from vacation, we are adjusting to our new normal. The mortgage is more expensive, the utility bills are higher, and we need a whole lot for this new house! Unfortunately, it’s our debt payoff that has taken the biggest hit. We just don’t have as much to throw at our snowball as we have in the past.

Our debt pay has been pretty stagnant over the last two months.

As of my last update in June, we owed a total of $23,246.17. 

Here are our current debt totals:

            $10218.38       Credit Card at 15.74% - current minimum payment is $256

            $1150             The Boy (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from him.)

            $1100             The Girl (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from her.)

            $10650.25       Car loan at 0% - payment is $345

Our current debt stands at $23118.63

Debt payoff over two months was ABYSMAL!!! The only plus side here is that there was a decrease. It wasn’t much, it was actually less than 1% if you can believe it. This was definitely an expensive summer. In fact, our credit card balance went up… UGH! It’s a losing battle. I know we need to stop using credit, but we don’t do make that commitment. And what’s even worse about all of this, is that our credit card keeps sneaking up our interest rate a little at a time. We have got to get this card paid off!

Looking at the numbers, I’m hoping to keep decreasing. Ideally, we’d be able to get under $20000 in total debt owed by my next progress update. but I know that is a huge stretch. There really isn’t anywhere we can find an extra $3000 from right now. I will continue to be hopeful, though, and hope that we can throw extra money towards debt when we get into September because we are leaning towards not funding our envelopes because we aren’t going to be spending any (much) money so that money can be funneled towards our debt.

My main goal for next month’s debt progress report is that our credit card is below $9000 after stupid tax. I know that doesn’t seem like much, but we are struggling and that means we would have at least have a new first number. And, in truth, I’m not sure we will be able to find the extra cash laying around to get us there. It’s actually a stretch goal, but a goal nonetheless! Credit card debt is killing us right now!

With all our new bills, there isn’t a lot of money left over for debt pay off, so any progress is progress. Next month, we will have exceeded our point balance to get the maximum reward on our credit card, so I will redeem our points for a credit on our card. That should be a little over $300. That will help us to put a dent in our credit card.

Overall, our debt decreased. That is a trend we hope to continue. But most importantly, I want our credit card debt specifically to decrease! I am sick of the increases! I’m counting on No Spend September to help us out here!

We are continuing to make slow progress every paycheck, one per month for me and two per month for The Husband, towards savings and paying our children back. We put $50, per paycheck, into savings. We are ever so slowly building our emergency fund and adding money to The Kids’ accounts. At this rate it would take forever to pay them back, but at least we are making strides. Once our credit card debt is cleared out, we will be able to pay them back quickly. Our emergency fund currently stands at a little over $2000 with slow growth each month. It’s not much, but it gives us some peace of mind. That $2000 is above and beyond what we have left over from the sale of the house. That money is still earmarked towards home improvements in the new house and things we still need to furnish it.

Gearing Up for No Spend September

Every September for the last 5 or 6 years, our family has done a spending fast. We call it No Spend September.

We do this for multiple reasons: to get a hold on our out-of-control spending, to be mindful of our spending, to save money (or to have more money for home renovations), and to slow life down in general.

We are planning on doing it again this year. Lots of people/families do no spend days, weeks, and months and for each family the rules are different. Here are ours.

First of all, we pay all normally scheduled bills, obviously. We also still buy groceries and gas.

Our normal grocery budget for the month is $500. For September, we try to bring it down to $400. We don't "stock up" on things we might need and we don't buy extras. If we go out to eat during the month, which we rarely do, the money comes out of grocery budget. The most important thing we can do for our food budget during the month is plan, plan, plan! I plan our meals for the month and grocery shop accordingly. Because meat is expensive, we try to shop our freezer first to see what we could get from there before we do any shopping. We also look for any meals we might have frozen in the freezer. Both of these small tips help keep our grocery bill down. Just of the top of my head, I already know we have 3 or 4 packages of pork in the freezer (that don't already have a purpose) and 2 or 3 packages of ground turkey. We also have chicken, pancetta (we use this for a specific family favorite), and a couple breakfast sausages. Besides meat, I know we have the fixings for at least one breakfast fritata and probably another meal or two frozen in the freezer. Without going to the grocery store, we have the fixings for probably close to 15, or a half a months worth, of meals. Not only does No Spend September make us conscious of our spending, but it helps us to be less wasteful with our food.

As far as gas goes, The Husband commutes for work. He has to get there. Period. I live and work in the same town and because we highly curtail our spending during the month, my gas does last longer in September, but I still fill up as needed. In a normal month, we budget $600 for gas; Septermber is no different. However, we tend to have more excess gas money at the end of each pay period. That money will continue to fund our car repair envelope.

No Spend September really gives us a reset when it comes to our spending. It causes us to think about what we are buying and why we are buying it. It also forces us to take a hard look at our spending and see where we have let it get out of control.  And for us, No Spend September is a family venture. We are all, all in! That means no Starucks, no eating out, no new clothes or shoes, no buying lunch at school, no haircuts, no... I think you get the picture.

There are exceptions to the rule. If money is required for something at school, we send it in. If The Boy's football cleats broke in half in the middle of practice, we would replace them. But both of those things are the exceptiong, not the rule!

Any money "saved" over the course of No Spend September will be added to our debt pay-off. As you'll see in a future post, I'm making a stretch goal to get our credit card debt below $8000 by September's debt progress report so every little bit helps!

Have you ever attempted a spending fast?

Where our envelopes are sitting

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the way we budget. That was in May, 3 months later and we are still budgeting the same way. Our debt snowball has definitely shrunk as our mortgage and utility bills have ballooned. However, even with that, we are continuing to fund our envelopes. We need those envelopes so that we don’t charge more than we can afford on our credit card.

I love having a surplus in our envelopes each month that we can carry over to the next month or until it’s needed. Here are the numbers we were thinking about “maxing” each envelope out to:

Car Repair: $2500

Essentials: $300

Hair: $300

Clothes: $500 (still toying around with this number… clothes and shoes can get expensive!)

School: $300 - $400

Kid’s Activities: $500 (I waiver a lot on this category, too, because our kids’ activities can get really expensive.)

After much consideration, I still think these are great goals to shoot for except for the school envelope. I’m going to raise the goal for that to be $500. Over the summer, some of our envelopes actually hit these targets, but then money was spent from them so they aren’t that high anymore. (But isn’t that what the envelopes are for? To spend?) It was definitely nice having the money when we needed it; especially when it came to our clothes and school envelopes. The back-to-school grind is no joke!

So where do the envelopes actually stand? Let’s take a look.

            Car Repair: $955

            Essentials: -$126

            Hair: $230

            Clothes: $160

            School: $83

            Kid’s Activities: $388

Now let’s break all the numbers down and see what they really mean for our budget, shall we?

Car repair… Our car repair envelope really took a beating over the summer. We got oil changes for two cars and on my car we got my tires rotated and some (super expensive for what it was) sensor replaced. We also took from this envelope to pay our kids (plus 2 more) for some work they did when we were moving in. It wasn’t the smartest move we ever made, but the extra help moving was well worth it in our opinion.  We have been slowly contributing to this envelope to try to grow it. Also, now that our summer vacation road trip is over, all leftover gas money at the end of a pay period will be going into our car repair fund until we reach $2500. Yesterday, I was able to add $95 from leftover gas money and we are hoping we can add even more going forward. $2500 here we come!

Essentials… Clearly we need to budget more money towards this every month since we are in the negatives! Generally, we put $100 a month into this envelope, I’m thinking we need to up it to $200 at least. The only plus side of this is we shouldn’t need to buy much out of this category for a while. I recently bought toilet paper, dish washing detergent, laundry detergent, razors, body wash, and shampoo and conditioner for the kids. I’m sure there will be stuff we need, but I’m hoping it won’t be anything too expensive or that’s needed too urgently.

Hair… Our hair care envelope it doing okay. It’s currently sitting at $230 but that is after paying the remainder of the cost for The Girl’s highlights (she had a giftc ard from her birthday) and having The Boy’s hair cut for back to school. We only need $70 to top that envelope off, but we didn’t budget any money for it in August so it will be a goal for September. (Maybe October if we decide not to fund envelopes in September because of No Spend September… more on that later.)

Clothes… The fact that envelope still has $160 in it even after back to school shopping makes me so happy. We spent $250 on shoes alone, plus even more money on first day of school outfits and The Boy is playing football for the first time so he needed some workout specific clothes… and we still have $160 in there! However, cold weather is on its way so we will be needing to buy pants and long sleeves for the kids before too long. We will continue to fund this envelope, shooting for that $500 target.

School… Wow did this envelope save my bacon when it came to back-to-school shopping! I had to buy school supplies for 2 kids plus my own classroom and… drumroll please… there was enough money!!! However, we had over our “max” in the envelope. The envelope had $530 in it, so I guess, like I said earlier, I will max it out at $500. Even after shopping, we had some money left in the envelope so that when the kids actually started school we still had money left over for all the necessary first week of school things: donations for Science class, cost of the agenda, etc. (And we still have a little bit of money in there if needed until we can get it built back up!)

Kid’s Activities… We didn’t have to spend too much from this envelope over summer, but now that their activities have started back up, this envelope is going to get used. The Boy’s football is paid for, but The Girl’s dance has a lot of upcoming expenses: costumes, comp fees, shoes, and the like. We will be using this envelope, in conjunction with a separate account, to pay for these things as they come, but it certainly makes it difficult to grow too much of a cushion.

Our New Normal

We haven't yet had one "normal" month with our new mortgage and budget, but we are starting to see what some of our bills are going to look like.

Our mortgage, while huge, is not quite as big as we were anticipating. It’s about $175 less than we were anticipating it being. For the first month, we decided to pay the amount that we expected our HELOC to be. We also paid extra on our first mortgage. I don’t know that we will do that going forward.

Our PG&E bill, for only 23 days, of which we were on vacation for half of them, was “only” $278. I say “only” because we were told by people we know who have a pool, to expect utility bills upwards of $800. Our next bill will be our first accurate bill for our utilities so we still aren’t exactly sure where we sit with that. (Our first normal bill came. It was for 32 days, of which we were home for most of them and was to the tune of $308. That’s not as bad as we were expecting and are so glad our house is well insulated.)

I have paid our DirecTV bill TWICE when apparently I didn’t need to. I hadn’t been receiving bills so I just paid what I expected them to be. What I didn’t realize was that our DirecTV bill is now combined with our phone and internet bill (because AT&T bought out DirecTV). Now I need to call DirecTV to get a refund check issued. That’s a pain in the butt, but on the plus side, that means our bills are $65 less than I have been paying the last couple of months.

Overall, many of our bills have actually decreased. Because we moved, many of the companies considered us “new” customers so we were eligible for new customer deals. Our internet bill went down. Our landline phone bill went down. Our DirecTV bill went down. It’s a great trend and I love to see a decrease in bills because that’s not usually the case. Many of these decreases are promotional discounts that will only last 6 or 12 months for example, but we can call customer service when the promotional discounts expire and see what else we might be eligible for.

Unfortunately, as great as the move and new house have been, there is one major drawback: the one thing that really will suffer because of the move is our debt repayment. In order to keep funding our envelopes (sinking funds), we won’t have as much to throw towards debt. In addition, with our increased mortgage, we don’t have a lot of extra money floating around.

We really need to be diligent with our purchases and spending going forward, both to adjust to our new normal and to maximize our debt repayment.

This really is our new normal and we need to get used to it.  There definitely is a price to pay for a new, big, beautiful home. However, our old house was just no longer practical for us and we needed more space. Now we have it and need to deal with the repercussions of that choice.

Unusual Spending for August

We aren't anticipating too much unusual spending for August.

We will be starting back to school shortly and we have already paid for all of our back-to-school expenses like backpacks, first day of school outfits, and school supplies.

In August, we will have to pay registration, summer, and first month dance fees for The Girl. My dad's 75th birthday is this month and we are having a party for him at our house. (We will have help paying for this, though!) That's really all I can think of. We still have a lot of house stuff we need to buy, but nothing that I see specifically has to be bought in August.

The Girl's dance fees will be expensive! I need to pay a $25 yearly registration fee, fees for the month of August, and our first regular month's tuition for September. Let me tell you, dance fees add up! Dance is definitely a sport that is prohibitively expensive!

My dad's party will also be expensive. The food will be the biggest killer. I will assign different family members to bring things, but because it's at my house, I will probably do the bulk of the heavy lifting.  Although the party itself is not a surprise, the theme will be. My dad loves Halloween so we are having a haunted house costume party. I have a lot of decortions already, will sneak some of my dad's out of his house, and then probably need to buy a few small things.

I think that's about all as far as our unusual spending goes.  Because we finished all of our back-to-school shopping and did meal planning, August is shaping up to not be too expensive of a month. But, as always we'll really see how we did in the end of August!

Meal Planning

When I'm on top of my life, I meal plan. I sit down with a calendar for the upcoming month and plan our entire month's dinners, weeknights only. As any personal finance blogger will tell you, one of a family's biggest budget lines is food; mine is no exception. We budget $500 a month for food, but probably spend closer to $800 - $900 with eating out, food delivery, and quick trips to the grocery store.  We need to get better about this!

When we meal plan we save money, our life is easier, we have a plan for dinner for all the busy nights, and we have all the ingredients needed for said meal.

We are no different from any other family. Every night, 5:00 rolls around and The Kids start saying they are hungry and asking what's for dinner, and I wander over to stare blankly in the freezer. When I meal plan, we don't have those problems. We just check the schedule the night before and pull out whatever needs to come out of the freezer, and boom, dinner is so much easier!

We also save a ton of money by meal planning and planning ahead! I sit down with a blank calendar page for the upcoming month, 5 or so cookbooks, and several pieces of binder paper. Then I just start picking out recipes. I try to mix it up. I'm not a big meat eater (not against it, it's just not my favorite) but my family is. Each week I try to include one beef recipe, one pork recipe, one vegetarian dinner, and then I usually fill in with chicken.

As I plan, I pay attention to what is going on in our life each day. For example, The Girl had dance on Mondays and The Boy has football on Tuesdays, etc. We plan meals accordingly. Maybe on those days, we do slow cooker meals to make life easier.

As I plan, I make our shopping list at the same time. I try to list ingredients with like ingredients: meat with meat, dairy with dairy, and canned goods with canned goods. This helps me transverse the store without having to crisscross is 100 times... hopefully. I also keep a separate list that is broken down by the perishables we need each week, and I'm not talking about our staple perishables like milk and bread, but about what vegetables we need for each meal each week or if a recipe calls for sour cream. I will only buy the sour cream on the week starting when we need it. For example, if sour cream isn't needed until the end of August, then I will wait until the last week of August to buy it as opposed to buying it when I do my main shopping trip at the beginning of the month. (I have no idea if this makes sense, but at least I know what I'm trying to say, right?!?)

We don't prep any of the food, we just plan it and grocery shop, but it makes our life so much easier! And it is so much cheaper! Between two days ago and today, I did all of our grocery shopping for the month of August, minus any perishables we will need each week, and I only spend $307. In addition to the food for dinners, I bought 5 dozen eggs, 8 gallons of milk, 4 loaves of break, fruit for this week and snacks for lunches for the coming school year. I look at that number: $327 and I wonder why I don't meal plan every month!

We are lucky enough to have a Winco where we live. It is so cheap. I shop there and at Costco when I meal plan. I usually do all the shopping in one fell swoop just to get it over with. Then all we have to do is check our calendar each night, or in the morning before school, and we are good to go.

Meal planning is time consuming for sure! It takes about 3 hours to plan all the meals, make my lists, and check our pantry and freezer. Then there is another 2 - 3 hours grocery shopping and putting groceries away, but the time it saves in the long run is so worth it!

The cost savings is the number one benefit of meal planning. We paid just over $325 for nearly a months worth of food, and that includes meat. We eat a lot of meat. Included in that $325, I bought a 10 pound bag of chicken, another 5 pound package of "picnic" chicken (thighs and drumsticks),  a 10 pound pork loin, 2 pounds of shrimp, a 3.5 pound beef roast, 2 pounds of beef stewing meat, 4 pounds of breakfast sausage, 4 pounds of turkey burger, a pound of pancetta, and a one pound package of beef sirloin steak. I only point this out because so often, in order to create a cost savings, many people cut down on meat in their diets and we didn't do that, but we still only spent $325... for a months worth of dinners! I can't believe it!

Besides the cost savings, the next biggest benefit of meal planning for us is the convenience. Now, for a month, we won't need to worry about what's for dinner. We just need to check the calendar the night before or in the morning before school and pull out whatever meat we need, and then we are good to go. Peace of mind is worth a million bucks!