Well, the budget is done. A preliminary version.
It's not quite as bad as I had feared. On a bad month our mortgage payment is 46% of my husband's take home pay. That's a big percentage, and it doesn't leave quite enough for everything else. The good news is, IF we can get the credit cards paid off we should be fine barring any major emergencies. My income should be enough to cover the difference with a little bit left over. The bad news is that major emergencies are pretty much the norm around here. Do you know how much an ambulance ride costs? Do you know how little insurance pays . . . sigh. Also, my income is not predictable and not guaranteed. Some months sales are great, some months not so much. Sometimes a great fabric comes along at a great price and I buy a hundred yards of it . . . leaving the business account empty and me unpaid. Anyway, point being we should be able to manage. And of course there are months when my husband gets lots of overtime and actually makes some money, although that has been pretty rare in the past couple years. I blame George W. Bush, but that is another story entirely.
You know what annoys me? All that great advice about skipping your daily latte and saving a ton of cash. I certainly have not been buying a $6 latte every day. Or, oh I don't know, ever? Well, okay I DO splurge on a caramel iced latte from Dunkin' Donuts about 3 times a year. If I were to skip that I could save about 90 cents a month.
I digress, though. The first area of the budget I am focusing on is the credit cards. We should be able to get them mostly paid off with our tax return. Then I'll pay as much as I can on what's left to get that paid off as soon as possible.
Step two will be to start saving. I'm not sure if we'll ever get to the point where we have 6 months of living expenses in savings. Quite frankly it seems unlikely. We'll start by aiming for one month.
Right now our grocery budget is about $300. I usually spend about $100 every 2 weeks on groceries and another $100 or more, sometimes much more, picking up bread, milk, etc. between shopping trips. I would like to cut the grocery budget back to about $200. I think this is do-able if I clip coupons and only buy things if they are on sale AND I have a coupon. It's pretty time consuming to shop this way, but I have been doing it for the last few months and it is a nice feeling to have the freezer and pantry full. Summer is coming and this year I hope to get lots of fresh veggies from the garden for nearly free. Last summer's weather was not great for the garden - a month of rain followed by two months of no rain at all. My tomatoes were the only thing that were thriving. Until they developed the tomato blight that was all over the news and I had to rip them out of the ground and throw them out. Heartbreaking. Another good reason to start my own seedlings.
So that's the plan. Wish me luck!
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