I am the person who handles the finances in our family. I track our spending habits and make sure our accounts look like they are supposed to. I regularly head on over to the websites of our banking and credit institutions to check to see what purchases were recently made and enter them into our tracking spreadsheets (I used to do this using receipts but it ended up being more convenient to use the bank for this). These spreadsheets make prefect sense to me, but as I mentioned before they are still a work in progress and only look like a jumble of numbers to my wife. In fact, she considers them unreadable - and it is one of my new challenge-ified goals to make the information contained in these spreadsheets not only readable but also usable by my wife.

At the end of this month I am planning on taking the first step toward this goal. I will be putting together a presentation for my wife that will outline our financial situation. I have tried doing a similar thing before by just pulling my wife over to our computer and showing her the important information, but as I mentioned before these spreadsheets are unreadable to the outsider. I asked my wife the types of things that she would want to know about our finances and here is what she told me:

• how to get into our financial accounts
• where our money comes from
• where our money goes
• how we are progressing on our savings goals
• it has to look pretty (ummm, my spreadsheets don’t look pretty?)

All the suggestions are really good ones (especially the one about how to get into our accounts!) . So I am working on getting together a presentation that does all these things in a way that my spreadsheets simply can’t do - a pretty way. I’m not sure how effective I will be at accomplishing this, but it never hurts to try. I am putting together a Power Point like slide show so that I am forced to stray a from putting things in spreadsheets. Hopefully this will give me some insight into how to make my system more readable for my wife and this knowledge will translate into fulfilled challenge-ified goals.

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Posted in Family Life ~ No Comments

If you aren’t a reader of Gather Little By Little I wrote a guest post for glblguy that he put up today. Feel free to head over to his blog and check out my article Why be frugal?

If you are new to my blog, please consider subscribing to my feed and checking out some of my articles. I am currently in a series discussing why my family is committed to live debt free. I’ve also written about monkeys, ninjas, and what you can do with pennies. I enjoy tracking my spending, managing my family budget, and have some realistic but ambitious goals for 2008. Feel free to stay as long as you like. And remember - always be good, always stay clean, and always have fun.

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Posted in Blog ~ 3 Comments

My wife and I budget. Well, that is not technically true. I build spreadsheets and crunch numbers and think of areas where we can shave off a few dollars here or there, but my wife is actually the one in the trenches making our family budget work. If it wasn’t for her we would probably be eating Top Ramen every day instead of the nutritious and flavorful meals we currently eat. Our house would be drab and spartan, instead it is warm and welcoming. My clothes would be torn and tattered, but she keeps them clean and neat. If it wasn’t for my wife applying what we plan, all my tinkering would get us nowhere.

But if my wife is the soldier in the trenches, then I am like the Captain on the field. I can see where the tide of expenses is encroaching on our precious financial independence and devise the strategy to defeat our foe. I am there, ready to lend a hand where needed - but my primary responsibility to to stand back and get the big picture. I have to keep the good of my family, which includes the mental health of my wife, in my mind constantly as we face the day to day struggles of finances. If it wasn’t for the plan, we would soon be overwhelmed by the smallness of our income and the greatness of our expenses.

You see, in a family it takes the commitment of all its members to live debt free for the sake of changing the world and there is no greater display of this than in budgeting. Budgeting is a tool that tests your fiscal tenacity, a way to control and maximize financial efficiencies. It takes careful planning as well as thoughtful execution. Without these two components any budget will either fail, be useless, or make no lasting change on the world.

Here are five quick reasons to budget:

1. It takes the guess work out of things - if you budget you know exactly how much you will be making and how much you will be spending. This will make saving for things like retire-from-earning-a-wage-but-still-working-to-help-people-in-need-ment a whole heck of a lot easier.
2. You know exactly what needs to change - since you will know exactly how much you make and how much you spend you will be able to see where you spend too much money or where you make to little. This knowledge is power.
3. You know exactly how to change - this is directly related to the above. Once you know the problem you can analyze the information and make the changes that you need to. Are you living a lifestyle that you cannot support? Is coffee, or clothes, or the place you live destroying your ability to stay out of debt and change the world? Then this is where you see the stark reality of your finances and shape up.
4. Law and order brings freedom - I love rules. I mean, without that law of gravity and the law of friction I would be going nowhere fast! Laws bring structure and function to our life and often times our financial life needs some structure so that it can function.
5. Chuck Norris would do it - you know the guy budgets. If it is good enough for the Chuck you know its good enough for you.

*whispers* Save the budget, save the world.

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Posted in Budgets, Featured ~ No Comments

For everyone who was smart enough to already have their taxes completed and filled out you are probably waiting by your mail box like Elvis in Return to Sender. Fear not, the IRS is not a hoochie momma who will let your romantic, Elvis-esque hip gyrations and tax return go unnoticed. They just like to play hard to get.

But if you are in serious earnest to find out when you will be getting your money back, you can go to the IRS website and check it our for yourself. All you have to do is enter your SSN, how you filed, and the exact amount of your return (sorry to all those work readers who didn’t have the wherewithal to carry a spare copy of their tax return with them for just such a purpose). I checked it out a few weeks ago and it told me that I could expect to get my refund by April 1st. Well, I just checked again and I get my refund tomorrow. W00t.

If you are a California resident then you need to head over to the California state version of what appears to be an identical program. But it has never worked for me so I have no idea when I will get my state refund. I hope it works for you but apparently the state of California really does play hard to get. Stupid Sunshine State making me sit in the dark. Where’s the sunshine? It doesn’t say.

Thanks to Fabulous Financials for pointing me to the IRS site.

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Posted in Frugality ~ 1 Comment