Results of the Budget Revamp

After yesterdays ponderings of the budget, I sat down and did the November budget last night. I feel good about it, I just hope things work out according to my estimates. If so, I will be able to pay down $1000 of my car debt. That will feel splendid. I ended up slashing my food budget to loosen up the important things like my debt that was jammed up. We'll see how it goes.
You can see the little green piggy is finally closing in on the $9,000's. I'm going to cross over that mark this week if it means I sac my whole food budget and eat at the mission. I need the morale boost.
So, watch on Friday for the moving of the little green piggy!!

Sizing up the budget

The weather is changing and so are hegazelle's paychecks. Things are just a bit slower. I think this means I need an increase in intensity. Over the summer I gave myself an additional $15 per week to spend on food. I may do away with that.
I could cut my clothing budget down, because I rarely buy clothes and yet I'm putting $10 weekly into that envelope. I'm not sure though, since hegazelle has a hole in one of his work boots.
Fuel is such an unpredictable category that I don't think I'd want to cut into it. I put about $25-$30 in the fuel envelope weekly, and that's about exactly what I need to get me thru to the next Friday. I think I'll revamp the budget before Friday. It's time to get rid of this car payment FAST.
**Brilliant Idea** Wow- just that fast I had a brilliant idea! I'll cut my food budget to zero by eating YOUR food! Tell me what nights you cook and we'll be there every week on that night for dinner! Although, there are a few of you who would bust my fuel budget if I came to your house for dinner, so you're off the hook. :-D
Birthdays are killing our blow envelope these days. Until our budget loosens up enough to have a gift category, we buy all gifts out of our blow envelope. If you're related to me, please don't have any more kids in October. Or if you wouldn't mind, start celebrating your October birthday in May. I have more money then. Thanks.
Gotta go- I'm off to the 9-year old cousin's birthday party.

I haven't forgotten

Remember those Total Money Makeover stories to be submitted by shegazelle readers? Me too. WE REALLY WANNA HEAR YOUR STORY!

Party

If you know me and know where I live, you're invited to an Arbonne party at my house on Tuesday, Nov. 13th @ 6:30pm. I went to an Arbonne party at a friend's house and it was a lot of fun and they actually have some cool stuff.
If nothing else, come cuz you like me and want to eat the free food.

New look

So, 2 out of 10 voters dislike the new look. Well, I guess ya win some and ya lose some. I made the changes two weeks ago after much thought, preparation and template tweaking. So tell me now, is there something about the new page that you think needs changing? A particular font color that's difficult to read or something you would like placed elsewhere?
Just thought I'd ask your opinion since you are the readers after all.
And thanks for reading.

The Joys of Home Ownership

Oh yeah, nothin' better on a Friday night than to go rent a plumbing snake to clear the sewer line. It's like an annual thing at our house. I guess there's some tree roots that work their way in all year and block the line. It's great fun.
Ok, enough sarcasm. It's a disgusting job, so I stayed in the house and cleaned the carpet in our bedroom. Saturday morning I mowed the lawn, and tried to blow the leaves out of the yard. I had no luck since the wind was blowing. I decided God had a bigger leaf blower than me and gave up.
These are the fun things you do on the weekend when you have no landlord.
In other news, we've been sleeping in the spare room on the killer mattress since we thought we were getting a new bed on Saturday and moved our furniture into the spare room. Golly, I wish I was rich- I'd go buy a brand spankin' new mattress today. The crazy thing is the lady told us she got a higher, solid offer for $1300 from a guy in LA. The same day she told us that, she reposted the mattress again. If anyone is up for a game, email the lady mutherb@yahoo.com and ask her if she's still taking offers on the mattress. If you want to read the ad first, here it is. Let me know what you find. This could be quite fun!

It's a good thing I don't cuss

The lady that accepted our offer for the mattress "un-accepted" it today.
I don't have much to say since I don't cuss.

Maybe I'll just stay here a while

This post on the Get Rich Slowly blog is making me think I'll stay in my 1300 sq ft home for a while...

My Mattress Beats Me Up

No joke. My mattress takes the muscles out of my shoulders while I'm sleeping, ties them in knots, and puts them back before I wake up. I think it also punches me in the back very hard as I am ridiculously sore every morning. Same for hegazelle. This is a 3 year old Simmons Beautyrest Pillowtop mattress, not some old yardsale castaway. Within the first year, there was a major dip in the middle. This mattress was actually a replacement for the first defective one that did the exact same thing. So, my muscles would get stiff from fighting all night not to roll into the ditch in the middle. Then hegazelle fixed it. He placed a board in the center between the mattress and boxspring to offer support to the dip. This worked great-for a while. We now have what I refer to as the two hammocks; two dips with a bump in the middle. All in all, this mattress stinks and has been killing our backs for some time. But rather than spend the money on another conventional mattress, we set our sites on the Tempurpedic Sleep System. We knew it was gonna take a good chunk of money and probably wouldn't become a reality until after we were debt free and had 10K in the bank.
Have I mentioned before that I love Craigslist ? For a while I have been searching for Tempurpedic mattresses on Craigslist. There were always only a few, and they were mostly the base model mattresses with no airflow layer. Those retail for around $1500, and were listed on craigslist for $800. Well, last Saturday a lady posted a king size (we're sleeping on a queen now) DeluxeBed Tempurpedic Sleep System. She and her husband purchased the set for $2700 in February, and are selling because they're divorcing. So she posted an ad on craigslist asking for offers by email. I made her a very low offer, because until my bed actually stabs me in the back, I won't die sleeping on it. She emailed me yesterday- she is accepting my offer of $675! I'm shocked and stoked all at the same time.
I'll be sure to let you know how I sleep when I get it!
P.S. It may have been purchased the first time with MasterCard, but rest assured the second time it was bought with CASH!

Fun now or later? Living like no one else stinks sometimes

I'm particularly eager to be debt free right now.
Saturday night was a downer for me. Hegazelle and I went out with some friends basically to just hang out. There were some that were going to participate in a seasonal activity that cost money, and the rest of us were just going to hang out. I am referring to it as a seasonal activity because I'm embarrassed for you to know what it was we wouldn't spend money on, and how much money the activity actually involved. Anyway, hegazelle had decided he did not want to spend the entire contents of his blow envelope on this activity so he would fall in the hanging out category. I had a little more (not much) in my blow envelope and would have liked to participate, but not if it meant leaving hegazelle to be bored without me. When we arrived at the place where the seasonal activities were taking place, it turns out that you can't just sit around and wait- you have to pay a small fee to sit at their tables and wait. I didn't particularly want to pay to sit around, so we left to go find a restroom. We couldn't go home because others were depending on us for a ride and were participating in the activity. Those who were hanging out gave me the impression that they were only doing so reluctantly for our sake- which made me feel like a HUGE heel. Long story short, I got a little sick on some extra sweet, free hot chocolate, and got someone to give our friends a ride back to their cars. We went home feeling like big broke losers.
Then I started thinking about how this "telling your money where to go" thing is painful sometimes. Our blow envelopes are seriously underfunded due to our current need to replentish our emergency fund and begin paying rapidly on our car debt again. Ok, I'll scrap my pride- we skipped something that would have cost us a total of $20 not because we had no money, but because we had decided ahead of time what was most important to do with our money. For instance, we have enough money in our vacation envelope right now that we could have had the fun our friends had on Sat MANY times over. I spent the evening a little blue because blow was low, all while having in my purse a food envelope with money, a car wash envelope with money, a household good envelope with money, and a clothing envelope with money; not to mention money tucked away in various other places. But we made our decisions and stuck by them, no matter how trivial it may have seemed to others. Ah yes, how wonderful and noble- no, those were not my thoughts on Saturday. My thoughts on Saturday were, it stinks paying attention to where every dollar goes. It stinks having debt. It stinks not being rich. Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
It's a couple days later now, and I'm feeling pretty good about it. The next check will be a blow envelope booster. I may not have had the fun they had on Saturday night, but I've got a plan that's fixin' to make my life REALLY fun. No payments. Now THAT'S fun.

Life insurance

As requested by one lovely reader, here's a post about life insurance.

If you care at all for your family and for their financial well-being, you must have life insurance. We younger ones are the worst about taking care of this sort of thing; perhaps we think we'll live forever and life insurance is just another expense we don't need.
You need to have life insurance in place until you are financially wealthy enough to be self insured- meaning you've got so much stinkin' money, if you died tomorrow your family could continue financially fine. Hegazelle and I are in our mid-twenties and both have 30 year term policies. We figure by the time we're in our mid fifties we will have enough money that we can go without life insurance.
Now, on to the types of life insurance you can buy. I have had well-meaning, but uninformed people tell me that the way to go is cash value insurance aka. whole life. If you're not a wise consumer, on the surface this type of policy sounds good. But the truth is it's a rip off, and you should stick to term life. Term life is a bargain, and even stay-at-home moms should be insured. The person who best explains the difference between cash value and term life insurance is Dave Ramsey. Read this article before you continue.
So before you go on to read the next post on your next favorite blog, go to www.zanderins.com and get a quote on term life insurance. It certainly is a process (about 2-3 months) so get started now. Zander Insurance will give you a ton of quotes from tons of companies so you will get a good price. Also, a good rule of thumb: get 8 to 10 times your income in life insurance. Stay-at-home mom's should get at least a $200K policy too- good luck finding a Mary Poppins to keep your kids if something happens to her.
Now that I'm done being bossy about life insurance, I've got a few questions for you. Do you already have life insurance for you and your spouse? If so, was it a good buy or a rip off? Have you been putting off getting life insurance? If so, why? Do you have an opinion of your own about life insurance?

P.S. Get ready for a huge DUH: Do I even need to say that NO ONE CAN AFFORD TO BE WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE????
Toldja it was a big duh, but I know a few people who don't seem to get the concept. As Dave says though, "Stupid is not against the law..."

The Piggy Is Moving

I think the green piggy up there is still alive, but barely. This week I finished off the Emergency Fund (again!) and had $130 left to throw at the car debt. After the interest gobbled up its part, that left a whopping $49 toward the principal. So the piggy moved about fifty bucks. I'm ready for the piggy to turn in to a stinking locomotive...

Guest Post- The Total Money Makeover Series, Installment 1

As promised...our first guest post! This is the first in a series of Total Money Makeover stories from shegazelle's readers. There's still time to volunteer, so step right up!

______________________________________

• Name or Alias: MG
• Age: 46
• Marital Status: Married 20 years
• # of Children: 2, 1 living at home
  
• Occupation: Homemaker

September 19, 1961.…
I grew up a middle class neighborhood. I was taught good strong moral values and how to have good work ethics, although I didn’t use the latter much until much later. I had it pretty good as far as the material amenities went. The problem was this; there wasn’t a lot of financial teaching so all I had to go by was example. My parents were frugal for the most part but still borrowed money and used credit cards. They did the best they knew how but I guess my parents didn’t get much financial teaching either other than “waste not, want not”. Mom did very well stretching dollars when it came to clothes and food, as I recall. I must have picked up on that concept because those are also my strong points. I found out (when I had to cook for my own household) why we ate sooo much ground beef while growing up (I swore I would never eat it again when I was in charge), it was cheap and it would stretch far enough to feed eight people. Thanks Mom - I now know 365 ways to cook ground beef and “like it”.

Spring 1978….
So, like I said, I turned out to be a fairly frugal adult. I think I could even “out frugal” Mom these days (no offense Mom).
Alas, as frugal as I was, I still had issues: I still believed in borrowing money, using credit cards, and couldn’t get my budget to work very well. Here’s how it would go; paycheck comes in, goes in bank, pay bills, then spend the rest on food and miscellaneous items, until it was all gone, which usually meant within the first two weeks, and then tough out the rest of the month, or, “rob” Peter to pay Paul again (Peter, by the way, never got paid back). There was always more month than money, always. Basically, (I hate that word, but it works) I had my budget upside down. Something had to change….

April 2007.…
The scenario is a common one in America; I had much debt and zero savings. A plan for retirement was nonexistent. I own Whole life insurance (but not for long). I had nine credit cards, all with balances. One of those cards being a “90 days same as cash” beauty (I paid twice for that computer!). Oh... yeah…I pretty much made every mistake in the book. Then I attended Financial Peace University and all I can say is, to use the well worn cliché, “it changed my life”. As a result of “My Total Money Makeover” I now have a budget that actually works, paid off seven of the credit cards and in just three months managed to save the $1000 for Baby Step One (for me, that‘s a miracle). There’s always a few dollars left at the end of the month, and Peter and Paul have moved out and bought a Timeshare together! Amazing how this plan works!! I say this not because I want kudos, but to show that anyone can do this no matter how much or how little one has to work with. Suffice it to say, I am on a mission…I want FINANCIAL PEACE!! My endeavor to do so may seem a “little over the top” to most folks (it was I who submitted the $10 dollar grocery list to Shegazelle which, by the way, I have not tried. It was just a fluke at the time. I have since reconsidered, and may try it in future) but it’s what works for me. I am willing to go to great lengths to reach my goal. For me that means “when she pinches pennies, nickels pop out”. I am a dangerous consumer. By that I mean I don’t consume much anymore and when I do rarely pay full price. I’m sure Wal-Mart and Costco miss my frequent $200 visits. I could go on and on, but I don’t want to bore you. I have such a long, long way to go, but I am enjoying “the ride“. To those of you who have recently joined us, or perhaps, are pondering the idea of joining The Total Money Makeover, I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes:
“Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely“. ~Karen Kaiser~
MG

Two Things-

This morning I was reading the Good Book and came across a scripture that I think works here on this blog:
Prov 13:7 One man pretends to be rich, yet has nothing;
another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth. NIV
I think we all know pretenders on both sides of that verse, don't we?

Second thing is this:
There's a good number of people reading this blog who are in the thick of their Total Money Makeover. Every last one of you has a story, your story. Your journey thus far, your life before, and your plans for the future. I want those stories on this blog. In the comments section of this post, volunteer yourself for a future guest post and I will email you to discuss details. Please volunteer so I don't have to chase you down and draft you!!
This is going to be a fantastic series!

Victory!

Financial Peace University will continue in my area!! Word is spreading well, and I believe there will be a good size group at the orientation on Monday night. The first class will be October 22. I'll be sure to let you know how many are there changing their family tree!

Welcome to Fall