Enjoying some last minute spending

I've been enjoying some last minute spending before 2012 begins and my wallet is closed.  I went to Target and got whatever I thought we "needed" before the year begun. I've also had a few excessive drinks at Starbucks.

You may think, "well, that kind of not spending isn't going to save us money," but it might.
Today for example, I went down to the National Mall with my kids. I stopped at Starbucks and spent $7. Later on, I brought the kids over to the carousel, which I thought they would enjoy looking at.  No, my son just wanted to play in the dirt. He glanced over at it a few times, but wasn't that intrigued. 

 I thought about my children then, and how wonderful and easy they were to entertain. Also, how cheap they were. I was gloating over my cheapness as a mother.  I was thinking how great it was that I hadn't bought them any presents for Christmas - and the beautiful thing was, they didn't even know they were supposed to get presents!  I am, and always have been a supreme cheap-o.

Well, 30 minutes into the dirt playing, little boy looks up and asks to go on the Carousel.  I could have told him, "no, sorry, we can't go on it." or "oh, that carousel is just for looking" and that would have been the end of it.  But in a moment of spending frivolity, I looked at the ticket booth which both took Credit, and allowed children under 1 in for free, I forked over my plastic and spent another $7 for the day.

So we had our delightful 3 minute carousel ride. 

And 20 minutes later they were both playing in the dirt again.

Most young children are really easy to entertain and don't need fancy toys, snacks, or entertainment devices.  I was reading the newspaper this morning and Suri Holmes asked for $130,000 worth of presents, including a pony, diamond earrings and a fairy princess dress, all of which her parents were going to buy for her.   Does a 5 year old really need that stuff, probably not. No, definitely not.

What else could $130,000 buy? In Waslala, Nicaragua, a college student project has turned into a Social Justice project that is transforming lives. Water for Waslala  is seeking to provide clean drinking water to the entire state of Waslala.  So far, they have provided water to 3000 people in 12 rural villages.  It takes $100 to provide one man, woman, or child clean drinking water for life. Suri's Christmas list could supply clean water to 1,300 people for the rest of their lives.

So what about my $14 adventure today? Does that really make a difference in spending? Well, yeah. Since I go out almost every day with my kids, it does.  I try to limit my spending to once a week. $14 once a week is $728.  That's 7 Waslalans with access to clean drinking water, that's almost 4 months of student loan payments, that's enough for....

A cow - $500

A flock of chicks - $20
 

A pig - $120

A flock of geese - $20

 

 

 

 

 

 ...from Heifer International with $8 left over for a modest Starbucks trip for you and a friend - or two rides on the Carousel, plus $1 for a homeless dude.  That $728 is money that can transform lives and make the world a better place.  To me, that's what this year is about.  I want to spend less frivolously so that others may have more. Even when it means paying extra on student loans or building up savings, it means that we pay less interest in the long run - and are able to have more money later to give away, or if we have savings - we build a safety net which we can rely on instead of needing to go into debt.  

A trio of rabbits - $60

Working on the budget

Working on the initial budget is going to be time consuming, but worth it. It takes time to get everything set up. It takes time to fully understand how to use whatever system you plan on using, but ultimately it is a tool. A saw doesn't make a good hammer, you need to use the right tool for the right situation, and that may take some instruction. 

I spent much of this morning working with the online Money Manager on USAA. I also called their financial advice office to get a personal tutorial on their program. I also made a spreadsheet so I can project future spending and help us make long term spending, repayment and giving goals. 

My next step is to get all of our other credit card accounts onto the USAA account.  It will help give a clearer picture of our spending. One problem we have is that one month my credit card will be too high, so I'll stop spending, and then my husband will do all of the shopping, and paying when we are together.  Then my credit card is lower the next month, and his is too high. That system doesn't seem to be working. We need to get all of our accounts in the same place so we can really see how much we spend on groceries, gas, clothes, etc each month.

I also went out this week and did some stocking up and last chance shopping. I bought a box of diapers and a box of wipes so we have them in storage. Wouldn't it be great to not spend any money on diapers for an entire year?  I also use cloth, so that's my no-spending strategy there.  My other strategy is attempting to get my son to potty train.  There's no incentive like money, is there? We've been working on it all day.  Wish me luck!

Budget resources and basics.

I'm still getting store and sale emails in my inbox. The process of de-tempting myself is difficult, but I know I can stick to it!  Every time I get one, I just hit "unsubscribe"!



To help us begin making a budget, I decided to look into what our online bank offers.  We have USAA, and they have some budget tracking tools. They already have our financial information, so it should be an easy step for me to use their tools. I'm going to try using their tools for this week and see if it will work for us.

Their tool is called "Money Manager" and it puts your expenses into a spreadsheet and a pie chart. The expenses just have to be categorized properly.  I'm working right now to get everything categorized properly. It will lump all of our grocery visits into one line item, gas station visits, regular bills, etc. I'm going to start here for our family budget so that I can begin to get a picture of what we have been spending and where.

If you don't have USAA or your bank doesn't have an online money manager, here are some other websites that were recommended by other readers. 

Mint (www.mint.com) looked pretty good, the main website says, "the best free way to manage your money". What they do is pull all of your account information from various accounts and gather it into one spot. They can even send you text messages or emails to let you know how you are doing.  This is called "online account aggregation".  


Another online account aggregation resource is www.yodlee.com Yodlee Money Center. They have a program that is connected with H&R Block.  If you use H&R Block for taxes and money management already, it will probably be an easier conversion.

Both of those website can make a pie chart for you to visually show you where your money is going.

Another person recommended Evernote www.evernote.com It looks like a scrapbook for the internet, and anything you do online. You can also take photos of receipts or things in the real world. Evernote calls itself "your personal digital assistant". Again, its another place to consolidate all information. 

Prior to using online sources for money tracking, our family used a computer spreadsheet (Open Office - Calc or Excel) or a hand written one. I found a bunch of sample ones at this website: 10 Free Household Budget Spreadsheets There are ones for each month and ones for paying down debt, one for planning a wedding, one for a years worth of budgets to track month to month spending.

The basics of budgeting are this:
1. Find out how much you make. Make that a line item.  If you have a fixed income source (salary, usual wage) and a variable income source (part time job with variable hours, babysitting, etc) then make those two seperate line items.
2. Then find out what your usual some-what fixes expenses are and have a line item for each - mortgage/rent, insurance, internet, cell phone,
3. Then average your usual some-what variable expenses are - for us that is our water bill, we pay it every 3 months, so the month we pay it we need to budget differently. Other bills like this are electricity and car gas and heating gas which vary by month. We use lots of heating gas in the winter because that's what heats our house, and we use lots of electricity in the summer because that's what runs our air conditioner. We also use less of either in months we travel, and less of both in the spring and fall when the weather is nicer. But we still need to budget for them.
4. Then budget for goals like savings, debt repayment (beyond minimum payments) and charitable contributions. 
5. Anything you have "left over" then goes to essential variable things like groceries, date nights, clothes, and other things that we have preferences for which vary our spending.

This last line item is the line item that I'm aiming to change this year for our household. You may have different goals and that's okay. We can continue to support each other in spending less, and getting our finances in order no matter what our goals are!

My goal this week is to figure out what we spend where and see what our#4 and  #5 line item leaves us.  I really want to prioritize that #4 line item for savings, debt repayment and charitable giving, so we will have to cut back on #5 for 2012.

Budgeting

It is December 10th and I've got 21 days left of this year, however we are going to be traveling around Christmastime, so I really have 12 days before our trip to get our family ready for a year of no spending.  What I want to do this coming week is look at some free budgeting software programs and see if we want to use one of them. In the past we've tracked our spending on Excel spreadsheets, a piece of paper with hastily drawn grids, and not tracked it at all. The years that we've tracked our monthly bills were better spending, saving and giving years for us.  That may be because we didn't have one or two extra little people in our house, but who can really tell. 

So, do you use a budgeting program (a free one) that you think would be worthwhile for me to check out? If you do, let me know in the comments below or on our facebook page by clicking here. 

Thanks for joining me on this journey. I've already gotten a lot of positive feedback from friends that they too are looking to stop spending and get their financial house in order.  I don't know why, but it seems many of us never learned how to budget.  If we all do it together, then we can figure things out and hopefully turn conspicuous consumption into conspicuous cheapness, conspicuous un-indebitedness, conspicuous saving, and conspicuous giving!

I'm pretty happy with what I have.

I saw this comic in the newspaper this weekend. It is definitely the world I see all around me, and the world I unfortunately have tried to keep up with more and more as the years go by.  At the end of 2012, I want to gratefully proclaim, "I'm pretty happy with what I have." 

Baldo by Hector D. Cantu and Carlos Castellanos

Removing Temptation - in my email

I plan on spending the rest of 2011 preparing myself for my year of no shopping.  To get started, today I am going to get into my email and unsubscribe from all of the little temptations that get in my inbox.

Do I really need an email each day from Zulily that shows me cute kids things "I can't live without"? Do I need Groupon? Every time I buy a Groupon, I get lots of grumbles from my hubby about the limitations of using it, and the expiration date.  Staples sends me an email almost every day, there are ton of other ones too, Macys, the local bowling alley, local restaurants, Fandango, the list goes on.

While I may get a discount by using one of these emails to my advantage, I end up spending money I wouldn't otherwise. I know how to type in www.zulily.com if I want to do some cute clothes shopping with a discount. I don't need their updates in my email every single day! Hopefully, by eliminating the constant onslaught of temptation, I'll have more strength to "just say no" when I'm walking in Target or the grocery store.

Maybe the constant "deal" and "discount" emails are wearing me down on a daily basis, that when I finally should say, "no, I'm not buying it", I've already used up my strength saying "no" every day to Motherwear, Expressiva, and Living Social. 

The other problem with all of these emails is that they remind me of all of the things I don't have, should, and should desperately want.  Even something simple like a Staples email makes me start to wonder, "Is our computer good enough? Is it as good as this one that's on sale this weekend? Would we benefit from spending $500 on another computer? Maybe we need two computers, then we both could work on them at the same time."  And you know by "work" I mean get on facebook.  We are constantly surrounded by temptation, excellent deals, and the idea that what we have isn't good enough.

Well, this is the time to say "NO, I don't want those emails anymore! I don't want junk I signed up for anymore! I don't care what your "deal" is I want MY money in MY pocket, and I don't need your stupid stuff! I'm unsubscribing to you!"

You can do it!
And... while you are doing it, why don't you subscribe to something positive, this blog, so you and I can support each other  through out 2012 to Save It, Don't Spend It!
You can also join us on facebook. 

We have enough

Our family makes more money than we ever thought we would make, but we live in an area where many people make more money than us. We aren't actively "trying" to keep up with the Joneses, but our bills in the last year say differently.

Every month we wonder why we have so many bills, and why are they so high? Why can't we save as much money as we'd like? Why can't we give more money away to charitable causes?

We wonder if we will be able to afford to send our children to Catholic school. We wonder if we will be able to afford preschool for our children. Is preschool even a justifiable expense when I'm not working and I still owe money for my student loans?

I'm starting this blog to keep me accountable to my goal for 2012. I want to stop shopping. We have too much stuff around our home. It is impossible for me to keep it clean. I'm running out of places to store things. Our closets are overflowing, and most of it is "junk" that we couldn't live without.

I can always think of excuses to buy more stuff, but I'm wondering can we live with the things we've already purchased? Think of us as the anti-hoarders. Anti "buy more to save more" family. Can we make use of what we already have to make our lives happier, simplier... and maybe by the end of the year a little bit richer?

And if we can make our lives richer in money, what could we do with it? Could we actually amass 6 months of living expenses in our Savings account like we are supposed to have? Could we pay down our debt? Could we outright own our home? Could we give rightly to charitable causes? Could we buy an entire Heifer International Ark? Could we supply water to a village in Central America? Could we get rid of all of the "extra stuff" we have stored around the house by actually using it instead of forgetting it is there? I hope we can do some of those things. I've got a month to get ready to actually do it.

Are you with me? Join the movement.