I haven't always been greatwith money. Acutally, saying I have never been great with money would probably be a more correct statement. Every month, by the end of the month I look through my bank statements looking for some accounting mistake that will explain who has been robbing me blind from my account. I'm pretty sure at this point, I own half the stock in Starbucks and Matt has been single handedly keeping the vending machines at his work in the black. Is this some kind of sick joke? Am I on Punked? Alright Ashton, you can come out now... Is the real reason we never seem to have any money because we blow it all on [delicious, creamy, caramel-swirreled] lattes and potato chips? Outrageous.
Confession: I also have an addiction interest in online shopping - acutally it's more like an addiction to getting good deals online and have them conveniently shipped to my house where they are waiting on the porch when I get home in little brown packages. I looove me some good deals. I can only imagine this is what drugs feel like. Groupon, Woot, Zulily, Amazon and Living Social are like crack to me. So what if I bought a digital food scale or an ant farm for TC that are still in their boxes... They were 70 percent off people! Who can pass up a deal like that???
So, as one of my many New Year's Reolutions - I am getting control of my finances. (Confession #2: I did not really want to make this a resolution this year - but I was pretty much forced into it by Matt.) So I signed us up for Dave Ramsey's 13-week Financial Peace University. This class is awesome. The only regret I have is I didn't take it 10 years ago when I didn't have a rent payment or $800 a month in daycare expenses. But you gotta start somewhere right?
So we got our tax return (that I had planned on using for vacations) and paid off all of our debt. All of it. I'm talking the I-don't-owe-anyone-anything kind of all of it. I admit, it sucks that we didn't get to do anything fun with it, but it does feel good to not have to worry about 3 of our monthly bills ever again.
This week we have been working on a budget. I hate this "b-word" worse than the real "b-word". So I did a little planning for March and so far I have done a pretty good job sticking to it. I am aware it has only been 6 days into the month, but so far I haven't bought anything from my "crack" sites. GO ME! I can honestly say this is the longest stretch in my life that I can remember trying to be really careful with money. Six days... Sad huh? Now hopefully I can keep it up and watch my little stack of money grow!
