Creating a budget. Blah. This is the goal that I am least excited about, and most unsure that I will accomplish. Many of my other goals are fun. Gardening: YAY! Taking pictures of my cute kids: adorable! Creating something all by myself with just some boards and screws: awesome! Reclaiming our storage space: Yippee (okay maybe that is a stretch). Budgeting: Blah. Actually, I enjoy creating budgets. That's no problem. The problem is with the second part of the goad - sticking to the budget. This is also the hardest goal to blog about because financial situations are delicate, and people get all judgey when you talk about how you spend your money.
Don't get me wrong. I am (mostly) good with money. We save some. We contribute a large percentage of our income to retirement. We have minimal debt (mostly student loan debt for our graduate degrees). We save for college. We live within our means, for the most part.
We also waste a lot of money. We don't buy a lot of stuff, but it feels some some of our money just flutters away in the wind. I track our spending on using online tools, but when I see how much money we spend on food it makes me a little sick to my stomach. We could be smarter with our money, and that is why I have set goal #3. There are some big ticket purchases that I would like to make (new dining room furniture, new living room furniture, new bedroom furniture - seeing a theme?), but with so much of our money fluttering off in the wind (or into my belly), it's not going to happen any time soon.
To prepare for this goal, I have set up electronic transfers to increase the amount we are saving starting in January. I also have set up our electronic bill pay to increase the amount that we pay toward our HELOC. A few weeks ago, I had the following conversation with my husband:
Me: We really need to set up a budget and try to stick to it.
Him: Yeah, we do.
Me: We should talk about that some time.
Him: Yeah, we should.
Me: I'm hungry. I think I'm going to bake some cookies.
Next steps: Set time aside to work with my husband to create that budget. Start tracking spending on January 1.
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