How do you get "control"?
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| Mon, 03-06-2006 - 9:31pm |
I've been trying for months to get things under control regarding our finances, but I don't know what goes wrong. We'll do well for a few months and then BOOM! It's completely out of control again. It just feels like when things are going well, it all spins out of control.
DH and I make good money. We also have a mountain of debt, but we can make our min payments plus extra to the cards we have pinpointed for payoff first (we pay off the lowest balance cards and kick the extra payment from that to the next card). I use Microsoft Money to balance the finances, and I find that has helped me a bit. It at least helps me put things in to perspective for DH when I find we're stretched too thin. At one point, we were spending 300.00/mo on dining out. Ridiculous.
I guess I am looking for suggestions as to where to start, how to organize myself, and how to keep it up. What works for you? How do you keep it up? Any and all input would be greatly appreciated.



Hi Kristen,
Sounds like you are doing all the right things. I think that sometimes we fall into this belief that it will all go just as we planned and of course, it doesn't. Life happens and we get distracted or unexpected expenses come up or whatever. The key is still to have the plan. A couple of ideas:
1. You don't mention if you have built up any sort of emergency fund. If you haven't done that yet, you might want to consider seeing if you can get yourself up to $1000 to help even out some of the peaks and valleys of expenses in our lives. That will help you make sure you don't add to the debt.
2. If you have that in place, the next thing I'm going to do is set up what I've seen called a freedom fund. I find it very hard to tap that emergency fund (which is I'm sure a good thing) but I am starting to see it is not going to be particularly realistic that I am going to be able to stick to exactly the same amount of spending money every pay period. I am going to set up a freedom account with the intent to put a small portion of my spending money in it each payday and then tapping it whenever I need a little boost in other pay periods. Also, if I have any spending money left (not terribly likely it seems right now but maybe I'll get better at being frugal) I will dump it into the freedom account before I take my next allowance. I'm going to 'seed' this account with a little money from my tax return this year.
3. I don't use Money but I use Quicken. I'm able to enter all the future transactions for my expenses into infinity. Then I can click through each month and see if I am going to be ok in future months. There is a handy little graph and everything. If you are only using the software to look 'backwards' at what you spent, you might want to play with it and figure out how to look 'forward' too.
HTH!
Peg
Hi Kristin - excellent questions.
All my best,
Danni
Hang in there!
lvhunnie2005