Living on a Budget

I have been thinking about money and budgets lately. We were VERY lucky when we lived in California to be able to live rent/utility free. Yeah I know a blessing. So our only monthly expenses were for the car payment, cell phone, credit card bill, and any shopping we did for groceries, clothes oh and the 6/7 days a week we ate out.

Now that we have entered the grown up world of owning a home things are VERY different. We have a mortgage payment, student loan bills, cell phone, cable/Internet, utilities, and the list goes on and on. Uck.... So we came up with a budget which allowed us to include all of our bills plus a little to save each month. In essence we are forcing ourselves to save money each month which is good but it makes us not able to do everything we want to each month.

I know some day we will be grateful for the savings but in the present I have realized a few things.

1) No house cleaner: It was my hope to be able to hire someone to come every other week to clean the house. We could do this or put money in a retirement account. We chose retirement account. I have a day off in the middle of the week so I have been doing things around the house on those days to stay caught up.

2) No quitting my job: This is a big bummer for me. I may decide to change jobs post baby but for the short term I will continue to work so we can continue to save, hopefully remodel the basement, and of course start the process for baby #2.

3) No new car: We have an 8 year old car that we were thinking of getting rid of next year. We might wait one more year or if we do get rid of it, we may decide to keep our leased vehicle at the end of the term and just finance the rest.

4) Planning ahead: We need to plan when we will make purchases outside of our budget. We don't want to charge things on the credit card as we pay that off each month and would like to keep it that way. So in order to make sure we have that little extra for a special purchase, we have to plan ahead.

5) Eating at home: We usually only eat out on Friday nights and then maybe Saturday. I cook the rest of the week. I actually don't mind cooking. I kind of like it. I have learned to make a big pot of my own spaghetti sauce and freeze the rest so we can have 6 or 7 meals out of it. I make a lot of chicken dishes and even know how to make a pretty yummy pesto chicken risotto.

In reality this is no big deal, it is just a big change from what we were used to. Living on a budget is forcing us to be more responsible and not buy things we don't really need or at least think about it before we buy something.