July 2013 Getting Out of Debt Update

Spending budget: $400/mo.
We bought $311.37 and made $87 selling misc items.
Total spent in July : $311.37 – $87  = $224.37
If you’re wondering how in the world we are able to do this, you might want to read this post on cutting your household and grocery expenses.

Our $400 spending budget has to cover all groceries, household supplies, personal care products, gifts, clothes and other shopping purchases, as well as home improvement and entertainment.  It’s about a 30% reduction to our spending budget. If we come in under the $400, half will go towards the principal on our 2 homes and the other half will be split between us for splurge money. As a partial reward for buckling down and spending even less than with our previous shoe-string budget, we took a trip to Disney World in February with our savings. Our next goal for our splurge money  is to pay for a flat screen tv – it will be our first!

We made only the extra $25 principal payment that I have set to come out each month with our automatic payment. Because of all the extra house repairs last month we were really dipping into our accounts and I was determined that we wouldn’t use any of our emergency funds (we did that a couple years ago and never put it back)  We rolled and deposited all the kid’s coins from their tall banks, totaling nearly $200! It has to be put into our checking account before being transferred to their online accounts anyway I went through our gift closet and sold several baby items since it seems most of our friends are past that stage of their lives. Then,  I asked my sister to deposit $40 into our account just to be sure we’d make it the last few days until payday.  The check for the repairs cleared the day after we pay off both our credit cards for the month and the total in our checking account for the next 3 days was $40.28.  I don’t think we’ve ever been in such “dire” straights (obviously with a healthy emergency fund we had money, just money I wanted to spend).  It was definitely an eye opening experience, and not one I wish to repeat.  My heart goes out to the many families across our nation who literally live paycheck to paycheck.  I don’t know how they are able to manage the stress levels.

Preschool – and the preschool bill- starts back soon, but at least it’s only half the cost now that Turkey will be starting Kindergarten.  That also means I’ll be able to focus more on my work and landing more speaking engagements. <Shameless plug> You did know that I teach classes for private and public groups, as well as speak to groups on various money topics right????     Hubby has been putting in long hours on some big jobs at work, so there’s a bit of extra funds there too.  Hopefully that will get us back on track.