Marriage and Money

One…we bew our budget when we bought our new cars. 

Two…we didn’t take into account insurance

Three…budget has to be revamped entirely.

Four…budget has no room left in it now. For anything. This is not good!

Five…hubby and I agreed to deposit all of our paychecks into our joint account and transfer a small “allowance” into each of our personal accounts for things like lunch, gas, etc. Hubby decided to just have 66% of his check deposited to joint account and keep 33% rather than set up a transfer. That was fine. This agreement was made in January. His checks or even 66% are not being direct deposited to the joint account. He just deposits a set amount when he remembers, or more accurately, when I remind him 3 times! this week he got paid for overtime. I though whoohoo we will have extra money to cover things. I was wrong. Extra money stayed in his personal account. He is also avoiding putting the money in our newly set up joint savings. I’m beggining to lose my patience. We have had this conversation 5,000 times. I even offered to not have a joint account and we split the bills 50/50. He said no, he wanted a joint account. What is the deal with his hesitation! I’m ready to scream, but it’s so difficult to ask him about his money when I’ve always been so independent. I just want to know where things stand. I want to have one decision we both follow through on!

 

Charity

We sponsor a child through the Colombianitos Foundation.

Colombianitos

 

She is provided with school tuition, school supplies, and lunch daily. She is also a part of theirs Goals for Life Program, which all sponsored kids participate in. The program aims at keeping children off the streets and providing them with life skills through soccer academies. They are found in the lowest income areas of Colombia where the children are at the highest risk. All for only $25 a month which is debited from my account automatically and tax deductible!

As part of being a sponsor, we get letters from our kid and we are allowed to send her gifts on Christmas and her birthday. I contacted the local program coordinator and asked if the Christmas gifts could be sent late, she said that would be fine. I also got information on the family, the home situation, and her size. I found out that she has 3 youger sisters. All in all it is 4 girls ages 12, 11, 8, and 6. They were recently moved into a home provided by the municipality as their home was destroyed in a mud slide. 

My original plan was to send some housewares such as sheets, etc. However, it became to difficult to find out what they really needed. So, last night I hit up Wal-Mart.  I got some great deals for the kids. I chose to buy for all 4 girls because even though I only sponsor one of them, I would hate to imagine one of the girls getting gifts and not the other 3. I tried toi buyt things they needed that might be difficult for their parents to buy. things that I remembered thinking were “so cool” at around 11. I also wanted something that all 4 girls would enjoy. I bought them school notebooks at 97 cents each. I bought them a pack of about 25 pens at about $1 and 25 pencils with the cool earaser topper and grippies and sharpener the pack cost $2. I also bought them the cool gel glitter pens that was about $2 too (not a bargain, but it has the “cool” factor). I got a 75 pack of colored pencils along with professional sketch books and the professional earasers for the older girls to practice drawing (total of about $10) and construction paper 100 pack of crayolas and kiddie sketch book for the little ones (total of about $7) I also bought them a calculator for $1. Then came the fun stuff: a pack of 10 puzzles (100 – 500 pieces) for $10, Uno Cards for $5 and Dominoes for $5. As I walked out of the store, I walked by the girls section and noticed the clearance section. I found shorts for each of them for $1 and t-shirts for $3! I also picked up really cute bookbags for $15, $10, $10, and $7 for each kid and two jumpropes that were $1 each. All in all I spent about $100. I will also spend about $40 to ship it. My original total budget for this was $100, but both my husband and I know that when it comes to gifts and charity, I always blow the budget.

I am excited to know that I will have provided these 4 girls with clothing, school supplies, and games for $100. TO me, that is a bargain, specially considering that it will be tax deductible.  Shipping will be between $40 – $50, just because shipping to Colombia is expensive, but I’ll deduct it from the taxes and make peace with that. 

If you think you cannot afford to give to charity, just add up your trips to the coffeeshop or the bar. Personally, I spend $100 monthly on Starbucks (and that’s after cutting back) and about $75 on liquor a month. So, if you can cut that in half, you would have more than enough to Sponsor a Child. Everytime you want that extra cup of coffee, you can just think that you are feeding and educating a child that would otherwise not have that opportunity.

 

Budget Night

BUDGET

My husband and I had agreed to get together at the end of each month to create our budget for the next month. I have to admit that we’ve been slacking and we generally wind up doing it in the middle of the month, which is crazy because it means we’ve spent half the month without a budget. Anyhow, last night I began to organize my office and realized that we hadn’t sat down to do our budget for February. This happens to be monumentally important because we are currently looking to buy new cars and although we knew how much we had a s a down payment and about how much we could afford monthly, we had not sat down to look at the hard numbers. It turns out we have a nice chunk of change left over at the end of the month, so that takes a little of the stress away where we thought adding two car payments to the budget would be tightening thing up a lot. 

Also, it seems that each month that we are married there are more and more line items in our budget. I know that I used to always forget a few line items when I did my single budget. I think it was almost intentional because I knew those were things I should try not to spend money on. However, it seems like there is a lot of extra in our budget now (ie: gym, coffee shops, alcohol, dates, etc). At the same time, it seems as though we have a nice cash flow coming in form random places. 

REFI

I wish I had a whole post about our refi. However, I’ve let my husband handle this entirely. He bought our house last year before we were married, so he went through the entire process alone (we had broken up at the time). He talked with his dad about the car buying process and fears of budget strains and his dad suggested we refinance at a lower rate to find extra money each month. My husband called up the same lady who did his original mortgage loan and apparently this is a perfect time to refi. Depending on when we finish the process our rate will drop between 1.5 to 2 points, which is awesome. This will bring us a savings of approximately $80/month. Also, she found a different PMI company which will crop our PMI cost by $20/month. All in all we will save about $100/month with the refi. We originally wanted to refi with a non-HFA loan company so that we would be able to do away with the PMI alltogether and according to my husband that would drop the mortgage about $100/month. However, our credit isn’t exactly there yet, so we have had to go with a new HFA loan. We keep all of the house docments together, so the coument gathering process consisted of him grabbing a file folder out of the safe and cleaning his room to find two other documents — pretty painless. 

CARS

New cars. Ok, I drive a Honda Civic which my dad gave me as a graduation gift 5 years ago. However, that car is committed to my sister when she gets her license. My car that I bought is a ten year old Taurus. My husband drove a Mazda Tribute. Two months ago he was in an accident and totalled the car. At that point we got the insurance money and decided to get him a new car. In the meantime he drove my Taurus. We got $6K for his car. He spent about $500 to fix up the Taurus and wanted to use $3K to buy a used car. My first instict was that he would buy a crappy car that would cost us a bundle in repairs and maintenance in the long run. I nixed that idea and suggested he use the $3K as down payment on a quality used car. He wasn’t quite convinced (even though the Taurus I bought 3 years back for $1.8K had already eaten up arond $3K). Then he drove the Taurus to the office one Saturday morning and I had to pick him up because the alternator (we think) went out. Since my sister is close to getting her license soon, we decided we needed to get cars for both he and I now. At that point we decided to use the $6K as down payment for two quality used cars. My first idea wa to get another Civic or a Corolla and call it a day. He, however, wanted a nice car. He wanted an Acura. Iargued that that would be too much car for us. We don’t need large interiors, heated leather seats or wood grain panels. But he insisted. Then he had me test drive one. I fell in love! so then we started to try to stretch the original budget to buy two used Acuras. As I looked at cars in the Acura price range, I found a used Lexus and went to drive it. I ell in love even more! So it stands now, we are looking to buy a used Acura and a used Lexus both hopefully with under $50K miles and both at around $14,900 hopefully less than that. It is possible, we just have to wait on the right deal and pounce on it.

Well now that the budget is all worked out, I just have to post it on Google Docs and then next week we can get started on tax prep! fun times.

 

New Year, New President, New Look

It’s a brand new year and the Blog has a brand new look. Not to mention we have a brand new awesome president! Sorry, I can’t help myself. 

My Goals for the Year:

• Organize my home office
• Eliminate my debt (except cars and house)
• Buy new cars
• Increase income 
• Start School again!
• Create building blocks for my marriage (ie: better communication, date nights, etc)
• Blog more frequently
• Create a savings plan
• Create a retirement plan
• Begin depositing in my sister’s college fund

The End. Let’s see how I do.

 

Lessons from the Recent News

We’ve heard more news from the financial sector in the past two months than we’ve ever paid attention to before. Here are some lessons we can all take from the recent news

AIG Bailout

AIG announced that it was going under about one month. This was due to overly risky investments and bad assets.

Lesson: Be very careful with your investments. Risky investments can bring higher returns, but they can also be lost, thus they are riskier. when investing, be sure to draw a line to how much you’re willing to risk.

We, the taxpayers, gave them an $85 billion loan.

Lesson: Don’t make or accept loans that may not be repaid.

AIG took their tax executives on an extravagant vacation.

Lessons:  When you take out a loan, someone else is trusting you with their money. If you get a loan from family/friends, realize that it is their hard-earned money that you are being a steward of and thus, it should be used wisely and repaid responsibly. If you take a loan from a bank, realize that you are borrowing money from the bank’s depositors, just like gov’t loans come from taxpayers. The bank compiles our deposits and loans them out and that is why we get interest rates on our savings accounts. So, again, use loans wisely, you are borrowing from everyday people and your choices should be made with a sense of gravity.

Also, if you are in financial trouble, you should tighten your belt and use every extra penny to get out of debt and back on your feet and to plan for your future. Don’t spend money frivolously. That’s likely how you got in this mess to begin with.

If you loan someone money, and you feel that they are not being good stewards of your money, you have every right to recall that loan. It goes back to how much risk you’re willing to put your money under. It’s your money, you can loan it out, but you can also ask for it back if you think that the road the borrower is on will guarantee that you will never see your money again.

The Gov’t gave AIG another 37.8 billion

Lessons:  When someone else is screwing around with your money. DON’T GIVE THEM ANYMORE!

Don’t borrow more money if your existing loans are already weighing you down!

Sheriff Halts Evictions

This Sheriff In Illinois has chosen to no longer carry out evictions.

Skipping past the right/wrong and legal/illegal discussion, the lesson is that in these tough times, we need to rally around one another as communities and help one another out.

Passive Dad gives some great ideas to help friends facing a foreclosure

Other ideas are:

• offering to babysit every now and then if you’re home while they work — it will cut down on their daycare expenses.
• Pass along good advice/finds/coupons. I always forward Sale email or interesting articles to a group of friends.
• Split bulk buying trips. If your household won’t use 25lbs. of rice and neither will theirs, you can go to Sam’s or Costco together, split the 25lb. bag and you both save money.

Learning to Live with Less

These IReporters are cutting back

Re-evaluate what your needs vs. your wants are. Cut out things you could do without in your life. Whether or not you’re experiencing financial trouble right now, it’s time to reduce debt, and save money. You never know what tomorrow will bring, and that’s all too true today.

Cut back where you can and put your money away or cut away at your debt. Be as wise as you can be with the money you have.