Financial Swimming Pool

I feel like I am drowning. I am the child of two accountants and I can't seem to get my mind wrapped around the problems surrounding our financial situation, or rather financial disaster. I have spent the better part of several hours trying to find an answer to the question "how do I budget our spending?". Actually, I found out that isn't the question I should be considering....I should be asking "How do I STICK to a budget?" because I have created literally HUNDREDS of budgets over the years, but we are still here barely getting by, living paycheck to paycheck and wallowing in debt.

There are thousands of websites out there, all with their associated experts, that promise they have the answer. And for only $29.95 they will share the answer with you.....I am super cautious about this kind of thinking because anyone who is in trouble with money shouldn't be spending money to learn how to save money.

Last year at this time I created several spreadsheets to do an analysis of our monthly expenses and spending. I did just fine CREATING these, but I am at a loss as to how to TRACK these numbers. I have used MS Money in the past and it never seemed to work for me and today a website pointed out WHY.....it is focused on showing you where you came from and screwed up rather than planning for where you are going. Kind of like driving while only looking in the rearview mirror. What I really need is something equivalent to the old "envelope budget"; once the envelope is empty, you don't spend anymore. So today I went on a hunt. I found a couple of promising pieces of "software" that may help with this solution.

One is called "Mvelope" and is an online product that works by downloading your bank transactions everyday and then you drop them into the appropriate "envelope" on the screen. The biggest draw back is that it involves a monthly fee. But after some investigation, it doesn't work with my bank. Bummer.

The second and most promising at this point is called "You Need A Budget" or "YNAB Pro". What this one does is function like a check book register for several virtual accounts all at the same time. A one time fee is all it needs to be up a running. Biggest draw back....having to manually enter ALL transactions. I barely have the discipline to download into MS Money each month so I don't know how well this would work. On the other hand, in MS Money I do have to assign each transaction to a category and then accept it so I am almost doing the same thing.

Basically, this financial wellbeing thing is going to take several forms of analysis. We will start with the budget portion, and then work on the debt repayment portion. We HAVE to get our spending under control and that means that I am going to have to turn into a budget Nazi. Scott is not going to like that concept but at this point we are spinning our wheels. I just hope that we can keep treading the financial waters long enough to find solid footing again.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things we are doing really well. We have a rainy day fund, we have a long-term savings fund, we have an account that we regularly contribute to for Caleb's college savings. But we also have to use over draft protection every month because we are running so tight to the limit. As of right this minute, we only have $0.08 in our main checking account. Payday is tomorrow, but we are going to have to use ODP again and we just keep getting further toward the deep-end of the pool.