Budgeting Part 2

Budgeting has been a huge part of controlling our finances instead of letting them control us! Part 1 was about finding out where you are actually spending your money. It may not be where you think.

Once we had a good idea of where our money was going we got to decide where we WANTED it to go. I actually was tired of running up more credit cards bills because I had prescriptions automatically going to a credit card through a mail order pharmacy. That money just disappeared each month. So my balance was actually going up even though I was making payments each month.

We stopped all automatic payments that had been going to our credit card. We sell on ebay so all of our FedEx shipments were getting charged. Nothing regular, but just enough to throw off things for me. Also our paper and Netflix was getting charged. So I transfered all of those charges to my debit card. At first that was painful, because I was not actually changing my spending habits. I was just tracking them.

I also had a loan that I was using like an overdraft account. If I thought we were running low I would transfer money. When payday came I would transfer the money back. It cost less than a dollar or two, far less than a bounced check. However it showed that I was not really in control of my money.

More to come...