Finances... Boring....

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!