Hey y’all,
So, what’s new in my life? Well, my household is embarking on some seriously frugal times. My spouse and I have been looking at our finances, and we’re not doing so hot.
We have a large truck payment – a choice from when we were still figuring out the adult thing. We now have a mortgage since we became homeowners early this year. And we became parents a few months ago.
Moving and giving birth really threw us off our budget. There were several months that I didn’t even look at our finances. The silver lining is that my spouse finally got on board with what was happening. It took staring homelessness in the face, but we’re finally fully in this together.
I’m going to learn to stick hard to a grocery budget. I’ve always been pretty good about keeping grocery costs down, but it’s time to nut-up or shut-up. We can’t afford an “oopsie” bill right now.
Even though it’s tight at the moment, I’m working on reducing stress. I cut coffee (for other reasons, but still) which can harm the body’s ability to deal with stress. I’m also stretching and really focussing on sleep.
What helped the most was making a plan with my spouse. After my husband and I sat down and crunched the numbers together, I’ve never felt so calm about money. I’ve made plans on my own, but that made me more stressed. With my husband, planning actually melted that stress away. Planning with him gave him needed practice with our finances, and it gave me some much-needed confidence in our ability to ride this out.
As far as budgeting goes, I haven’t found an app that I like. I just use a spreadsheet through Google Sheets, and it works great!
What still bothers me a little is that the credit card I do have is drawing a lot of interest. I want to pay off the debt that we have, but I don’t know when that’s going to happen with this credit card interest. I need to figure that out.
Metta
Frugal Treehugger 