It's Budget Time!

Each year during the month of December or January Jarrod will sit down & review our finances from the year before. One part of this exercise is to see how "on budget" we were the year before.

In January 2010 the numbers told us otherwise. We were depleting our savings rapidly. The fact was Cadence was born, Jarrod had gone back to school, we moved into a more expensive rental & we hadn't changed our spending habits from our Glory Days in Oshkosh. While in Oshkosh we each had well paying jobs, a super cheap apartment & no kid. Luckily we had saved a lot of money during those Glory Days. The damage had affected our savings account - not our credit cards. Others have always come to us for advice - and now we were failing ourselves.

We came up with a plan (more communication between the two of us), a new budget (putting limits on travel & extras) & went to work.

This year when Jarrod came to me, the numbers were much easier to swallow. We had made it. On average we had spent what we made on monthly expenses. We did gather some extra & dipped into savings to donate more, travel out to Wyoming again & go to many concerts (um, embarrassingly our concert spending was up over $800! Guess we should watch that).

However, after looking at this year's numbers we thought to ourselves "We can do better." We have now started to implement some of Dave Ramsey's tips & tricks that we've heard on his podcast. And we purchased iBank 4 for Jarrod's mac so we can pay closer attention to our spending habits.

{Day 12: 

Jessie: "It's Girl Scout Cookie time!" 

Jarrod: "It's Budget time!"

Jessie: "Come on Girl Scout Cookie's only come around once a year."

Jarrod: "Girl Scout Cookies have meat in them."}