I toyed with the idea of titling this post "Stop Spending All of Your Money, Amanda." Between the two of us, I am the spender...but then again, Jake is also the spender (just not quite at the same level). Historically I grew up saving nearly every penny I received for birthdays and holidays. We married young and did mostly OK saving early into our marriage, but then BOOM. Baby. Baby gear. Cole didn't actually require much as an infant, but feeding the stroller habit required all of the monies. Over the years I have employed a few different budgeting techniques. First it was pretending we didn't need a budget, which lasted a few years. Then we moved on and signed up with Mint, a free budgeting tool that automatically imports all of your individual bank/credit card accounts and allows you ... [Read More]
Finances
31 Days of Living Well and Spending Zero
I may be one of the worst when it comes to sticking to a budget. Creating budgets? No problem. I use Mint for tracking all of our non-cash transactions and also use Budget Simple to design and change future budgets, but no amount of budgeting software has helped me actually stay WITHIN said budget.The quite a bit of our budget goes to leasing our current home here in Augusta, but part of my motivation for re-vamping our spending habits is due to the unfortunate increase in our cost of living with our impending move to Nashville. As much as we *thought* we were spending here, we are now going to be forking over nearly TWICE that each month for our new home. It is worth it to us because we are in love with the property and the area, but what ... [Read More]
