Financial Oy Vey

OK, so yesterday I spent WAY too much time trying to figure this debt/budget/finance thing out. Currently, we are making about $5900 a month but we have $5800 allocated for in our "budget". I put "budget" in quotes there because what we had before can only be loosely termed a budget. I have discovered that many people are going away from the term budget altogether and instead calling them spending plans, since the point is to allocate every penny to a certain place for the month, whether it is a utility payment or funding a savings plan. As long as everything has a job, that is a good thing. Finding "extra" money to pay down debt is going to be the challenge.

Paying for daycare SUCKS. It is the second biggest payment we have every month other than our mortgage. We pay almost as much each WEEK as we do for our car payment in a MONTH. Now that is a sobering concept. Yes, we can pay for a bunch of it pre-tax through the flex spending plan, but that only accounts for HALF of the amount we pay for the year. But since the flex spending is reimbursement has already come off the top of our take home pay, my goal is to count the reimbursement as "bonus" income that we can use to pay down debt or more importantly, build up our buffer (at least in the short run). But since daycare costs are equal to 1/4 of my total salary, it makes no sense to look at staying home with Caleb. It does make us stop and wait on having a second child, though. If we are struggling this much with only ONE in daycare, I can't imagine having TWO in at the same time. *GULP* Of course, if we were to have little to no money going towards debt repayment each month, we would be able to afford it, but barely.

I have climbed onto this get out of debt wagon in the past and quickly fallen right off. I would create a "budget" in Excel and then vow to stick to it. However, once I had created the "budget" I had no way to track our progress. Even MS Money which I faithfully used would only tell you where you fell short at the end of the month, but what good did that do me? Now I have discovered You Need A Budget and I AM going to try to use it affectively. Of course, I first have to figure out how to find the time to figure the program out and then monitor everything on a monthly (or even better, weekly) basis. I am determined to make this work this time and I am recruiting Scott's help and support. We got ourselves into this and WE are going to get out of it.

The thing that makes me sick is that we are making more money than I ever thought possible, but we can't seem to make the ends meet. It is disgusting! I didn't grow up with this much money and I can't seem to spend it wisely. How can we rack up $4,000 a month living expenses? But when I look at what we are spending our money on, I don't know where to trim. Our cell phones have become essential, DSL is a must, and I refuse to live without DirecTV.