Budget oh budget

Not one of the words that I'm sure plenty of us like to hear, but it's such an important thing. When you have one income, or even when you have two incomes, you really need to budget. I was very bad with my money before I met my husband. I would go out to eat all the time, and just waste money on food. But when you have a family and a small income you have to set priorities and make sure things are paid. We had a large amount of debt to clear up and I'm happy to say that it's almost all paid (minus my student loans for 5 years of college which once we get everything else paid those will be paid on again). It wasn't easy but it was doable.

I've learned that we have to write everything down so we can see where our money is going and make changes where needed. We went out for lunch one day and we weren't able to complete the purchase because we had no money in our account. (We don't have any credit cards because of our past debt problems so our bank account is the only source of money). From that point on I started tracking where everything went and how much we had so that we wouldn't let that happen again. It's been going great and we've not had any more problems like that since. But we see that we did spend on things that weren't needs, like going out to eat several times a week when we would go to the grocery store and spend upwards of $100. So that has came down. Like I said in my other post, we did get rid of cable for the time being, and may revisit that once again. But it is not a need. Paying our bills, getting out of debt, and buying needs like food and clothing became our priority and building up a savings. We have big dreams for our new house, and that of course takes money. So every little bit we have going toward that end.  I will be posting more about this topic (since my wonderful friend has encouraged me to do so) and I hope to share with you more about our budget and what we do to live with what we have.