we actually saved!!!!

HALLELUJAH!!!!!! HALLELUJAH!!!! It's September 30th and instead of taking money out of savings to pay off the credit cards bills I am putting money in, not a lot, but some... YAY!!!! Saving money has been a HUGE focus for us this month, we have taken money out of savings for the 5 months prior to cover our expenses. From building a new deck, a new fence, new family room furniture, new deck furniture, personal property tax, to just the every living and having fun life style we live- stuff adds up and it seems to be at the speed of light these days!!! We have tried everything, we have tried writing a budget but when we would go over we just said oh well we'll make up for it next month, we tried mint.com where we gave this financial planning website all of our account information and it kept a budget for us, however when we received emails saying "you have gone over your ____ budget" we just deleted them, we have said okay no going out or doing anything fun this month and yeah right that didn't work so here we were, what to do what to do, how on earth are we going to save money????

I talked to a few friends about what they do and the one that made the most sense was have separate spending allotments. So here's what we did. I keep a very anal retentive spread sheet color coordinated and all of everything we spend money on. This is easy to do since we charge everything in order to get the points and cash back, I just log into the credit card statements daily and transfer charges to my handy dandy spread sheet.

-all bills (both morgages, car payments, electric, gas, verizon, HOA's, insurance, and water) are paid out of "our money."

-Car Gas and tolls is also taken out of "our money," with Eric in sales he is traveling all over the place plus his job is 40 miles away- gonna cost extra gas, and then there's me I go through the greenway toll everyday which racks up a pretty penny, so this would just be way too hard to monitor

- So I monitored what we brought home compared to what we were spending on the "essentials" listed above over a few months and made a guestamate to what these things were going to cost every month. Then I took what was left over from income and counted on some being put into savings and divided the rest into 2, creating our own budgets!!!!

-Now we have our own money to do what is most important to us, from what we get at the grocery store, to if we get our hair done that month, to how many tennis matches we can play in, or how many softball and soccer teams we can play on, to if the dogs get to eat that month (haha just kidding we aren't that mean), to gifts and presents we buy for people, and how many times we go out to eat, out to drink etc etc.. each thing is chalked up under our own budget. What each of us have left over at the end of each month carries over!! Planning ahead and Prioritizing has made a HUGE difference for us.

What has been hardest for us is saying no to people. We have had to turn down some fun things and some things we would have normally not thought twice about, but hopefully people don't hold it against us, unfortunately money in fact does not grow on trees haha :(

So 11 months into this whole marriage thing and the Kings have the money thing down, at least for one month, call it a streak- I hope so!! CHACHING$$$