furniture

Today I spent less than $200 for a new television stand. The boys broke the old one which was a cheapie from the local almost-Walmart store. (I live in the middle of nowhere – a real Walmart is 50 miles away.)
We needed a stand. Well, maybe NEED is a strong word. The TV was working just fine on the floor. It’s just that every time the dog wandered into the room he took up his usual position in front of the TV. With a stand, not a problem. Without? I’m sure you know what I mean.
Plus, people think we’re redneck enough, what with my dh’s free truck in the yard. (It runs and gets him where he wants to go. I believe it’s a ‘72 model – older than me.)
So we needed a TV stand.
Problem is, the savings account for such “needs” stands at $50. Not enough for a stand. We prepared ourselves to put $500 on the credit card. Today I took #2 (age 3.5) and #3 (age: almost 2) to that town 50 miles away with a Walmart to hit a furniture store with sales.
About a dozen almost broken items later (#3) and all of the couches getting a run for their money (#2) – “man those recliners are cool – and that fact that they ALL recline in the same way – fantastic!” – we found a TV stand that would work. Not my dream stand, but for $196 after tax, it’ll do.
This is the first real piece of furniture we have purchased in five years. Now let’s hope we can pay it off soon.

a little extra

I received a check today for $26.30 from a children’s consignment store in town. Last fall I took down a few items down last fall even though I wasn’t excited that I would only receive 45% of the sale. That’s not much cash when you’re talking $2-$5 clothing. But I had a huge play item that I didn’t have room to store and decided to give it a try. If it didn’t sell, I’d let them store it for 6 months then think about a garage sale this spring.
It sold. So did a few clothing items. Now I have $26.30 in extra cash to use somewhere.
But where?
Groceries?
Towards a small credit card bill?
Play money?
Savings?
Camping fund?
It’s not much money, but it will help somewhere as long as I put it somewhere instead of just spending it like I would before.

grocery shopping

Groceries for one week: $97. Overboard.
My bad. I know where the excess came from: M&M’s for cookies, frozen blueberries, $5 peanut butter, Cheeze Its and a frozen pizza. It’s sad that I can’t buy those things without blowing my budget.

One good thing about my shopping: by using my reusable bags, I only brought home one plastic bag. That, at least, makes me feel good about the trip!

if you fail your budget…

…your budget will fail you.
This is the lesson I have learned in the past week. Yes, yes, it all goes back to our “free” vacation. I shopped while there. A lot. I bought a few new clothes for myself, which wouldn’t have been a big issue had we also not needed to go on the bi-monthly Target run, dog food, coats for the boys, etc., etc…
It all goes back to my first post: why can’t I spend $50 on myself without our finances falling apart? It gets so frustrating.
But, today’s a new day. We’ll pull out of it and hopefully learn a lesson.
Hopefully.

spend a holic…

…that’s what I was over the past days while out of town.
It’s sad, really, how much money I spent. I bought new winter coats for all three boys plus a pair of snowpants. They were on sale. They all needed new coats. Problem is I didn’t need ot spend $60 at that moment. But here’s the issue I struggle with: I live so far in BFE that if I didn’t buy them while in a larger city, I’d not get back to another larger city before all the winter coats were put away and/or sold.
So I bought them.
I also spent $40 on dogfood. I’ve realized that our dogs eat better than us and this has got to stop. February goal: find cheaper dog food, at least for the puppy.
The thing with “going out on the town” in a larger city, especially when a special event is in town (like the one we were out of town for) is that it costs way to much for entertainment. A beer at a dance we went to was $3.50 for a can. To even get into the dance we had to spend $5 per person. $17 to get in and get a beer. Where I come from, $17 will get you drunk.
So, anyway, we’re home from our “free” vacation. Now we need to recover financially from it.
Did we have a good time? You bet. I’m just glad it’s not a every month occurrance. Otherwise, we’d be broke!

costs of a free vacation

DH and I leave today for a working vacation – he’s working, I’m vacationing – a.k.a. we’re piggybacking on his companies bill. He gets to sit at a booth for two days talking to farmers and ranchers about money. In return, he gets a trip out west, hotel, food and rodeo tickets. I’m accompanying him. For the trip, our expenses include my food and drink.
It’s the expenses that will occur before and after the trip that will add up.
First we have to kennel the dogs – two of them – at $6 per day times 5 days: $60
Our oldest, in the third grade, didn’t want to miss school or activities, so he’s staying with our high school sitter and her family: $50
Our two youngest will accompany us two hours into the trip to stay at their grandparents. Cost of deprogramming them from spoiling? Our sanity.
Souveniers for the boys: $30 (we have to – helps with the guilt of going without them.)
So this “free” vaca is going to turn into at least a $200 event. (I eat cheap.)
But considering we don’t vaca alone ever, and we will be gone for three glorious nights and four wonderful days, that $200 is worth it.

you made your bed…

For about 24 hours my dh and I owned a brand new king sized bed.
We’ve been dreaming about it for years – 3 to be exact – ever since my parents decided their newer king sized bed was too firm and it was time to buy another one. The first bed got moved to the guest room where dh and I slept one peaceful evening.
It was heaven.
DH is a big guy. We have 3 growing boys who love to crawl into bed with us every morning between 6-7 a.m. A king sized bed is exactly what we needed.
So we scoped out prices. We knew it was going to cost us.
Once January hit we started figuring out in our minds what our tax return would be. We estimated it at around $4,000 due to some cattle loss. I own my own business. DH is a part-time farmer. We even went so far as to talk to our accountant, briefly at a public event. He seemed to think we’d probably get somewhere around that figure back as well.
We were pretty confident.
Last Sunday a furniture store ad with sale beds was a little too tempting, so we took the plunge and bought a bed. Put the balance on our credit card (which is paid off.)
Monday was tax time.
When all was said and done we discovered that we’d be getting less than half that much back.
How can that be?
We overlooked a few details about owning a business.
Good bye bed – we hardly knew ya! (Actually, we never knew ya… it was supposed to be delivered Friday.)
Sure we could have kept that balance on the credit card – paying it off over the next six months or so. But that’s not what our new financial life is all about.
The first half of our return has been earmarked towards some small lingering debt. That’s where it’s going to go. The second half of the $4,000 we thought we were getting? It’s gone. But because we made the wise decision to halt the bed purchase, we don’t have to worry about paying it back in 2008.
And that feels good.

coupons

I saved $3.10 today grocery shopping all because I clipped a few coupons.
Doesn’t sound like a lot of money?
That $3.10 paid for my Sunday newspaper. And my town’s weekly newspaper. And the Saturday paper I picked up on the spur. (I got those coupons out of those papers.)
Lots of people are against coupons. I’ve always appreciated them, but rarely used them. What I should say is: rarely remembered to use them. I would always find them on the bottom of my purse, months expired, a wrinkled mess of paper that could have saved me money.
Then I had children. My first diaper coupon that really made a difference opened my eyes to the world of coupons. If I could save $2 on diapers, that’s $2 I could use elsewhere. So I tried to keep my eye out for coupons for other things: clothing, food for the pets and us. Finding a great coupon is a good feeling. Finding a good coupon AND a sale item is exhilarating.
Ok, maybe not exhilarating, but… you know what I mean.
Here’s my coupon plan:
I breeze through the ads for my local grocery stores and clip any coupon I know I will use. I then save the ads for meal planning later in the weekend.
I breeze through the Sunday paper and clip coupons I might use. I take the envelope out of my purse that contains all my coupons and leave them all on the counter after throwing away the expired coupons. When it’s time to plan meals I have the grocery store ads and my coupons in front of me. I take the family calendar, make a mental note of things going on in the next two weeks that demand quick meals (church night, game night, etc. anything that necessitates a quick meal) I make a note on my grocery store list which meals need to be fast. I then look through my favorite recipe books for great meals to make.
Here’s the key: when I write an ingredient on my list that has a coupon, I circle it, write ‘coupon’ beside it or otherwise make myself a note that I need to remember the coupon in my purse. Grocery stores are busy. That’s where my problem used to lie: I’d have grand plans to use the coupons but get to the store and get distracted.
After making my list, I double check the pantry for items I might already have but forgot about. I stick my notebook inside my green bag (I take 4 large reusuable bags to the store to cut down on my plastic bag use), stick my coupons in my purse and away I go.
That’s the system that works for me.
That’s the key: find a system that works, the stick with it. If I save $3.10 every week at the grocery store, I save my family almost $200 a year. Not bad.

I’m not really this money crazy

I just need control.
Everyone with an addiction yearns for control. I need control over where my money goes now because for years I didn’t care. That doesn’t mean I overspent all the time. I have always considered myself thrifty with my money. I just didn’t have a clue about where it all went. I would go months and months with no new clothes and then, it seemed like always at the worst financial time for us as a family, I would decide I needed a new $60 pair of jeans – that I deserved them – only to find out minutes after tearing off the tag that my dh balanced the checkbook earlier and we were overspent by that amount and then some.
I fought frustration at those times. How could I work hard every day and not deserve a treat? All I wanted out of life was to be able to spend fifty bucks every once in a while without our lives falling apart!
Now that I’ve decided to take control of my dollars, I feel enabled to do just that. I know when I can and when I can’t.
I can’t 90% of the time.
That’s the nature of the beast. Welcome to lower middle class America where a student loan may get you a good job, but it will haunt you for the next 20 years as you attempt to build a life around it.
After the past weekend of traveling to help the parents with a house project, I am now in the red with my “leftover” money from shopping due to two fast food drive throughs.
What could I have done differently this week?
Not traveled.
But we owed my parents some labor from the time they put into our house during our remodel.
I had the $107 (yes, $107) in my account for the gas.
We needed crickets for the gecko and there’s no pet store in my small town.
So we traveled.
Now the excursion is on empty again and so is my bank account.
But it’s not in the red. That’s the bright side.
A year ago that would have been the norm. At least we’re making progress, right?

less than $10

Our camping fund for the new year is now less than $10. That’s right – I had to dig into the $13 remaining from groceries to buy marshmallows and rice krispies. In other words, I completely forgot that my son’s 1/2 birthday was Monday and we needed to whip up some treats for school.
My dh doesn’t understand the need to celebrate 1/2 birthdays. In my experience dads are practical. If you birthday doesn’t fall within the school calendar, tough luck.
I, on the other hand, grew up in a house that understood the need for kids to “fit in”. Don’t get me wrong, we were poor, I wasn’t given extravagent things to “fit in”. But I was allowed to have slumber parties with 8 guests every year on my birthday. I took treats to school on that day as well. I felt sorry for the kids whose parents didn’t care to do it. I also felt sorry for the summer kids whose parents were practical like my dh.
My son has a July 7 birthday. So every year on Jan. 7 he takes treats. This year I dropped the ball. Hopefully the rice krispie treats he took today make up for my sudden loss of memory on Monday.
He picked the treat (after I told him I wouldn’t be buying enough pop tarts for 24 kids). Thankfully he picked a somewhat inexpensive treat.
I think the $4.40 was worth it.
Camping fund now stands at $9. Thankfully it’s only January.