 Burger-Veggie Soup
Ingredients-
1# Lean Hamburger
1/2 onion
1 potato
1 carrot
1 rib of celery
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can green beans
1 cabbage
2 cups Tomato Juice
Cook meat and onions thoroughly. Add veggies and simmer on low until tender. Salt and pepper to taste.
All the credit goes to my mother-in-law, The Accountant's Mom.
After a year and a half of not having a budget, The Accountant created this. You have our full permission to use this for your own personal finances. I am not a whiz with Microsoft Excel. Anything that I have learned is from The Accountant. The best guide I can give you is to click on the square, enter the amount and hit enter and leave it alone. He created this with specific mathematical equations and if you do any more than that, you could compromise those original formulas if you aren't sure what you're doing. If for any reason, I make a mistake that cannot be fixed, I close the document, don't save any changes, reopen it and start again. What is so neat about this is that in the right hand column, you can see how you have done at meeting your budget. If its black, you're doing just fine. If its read, then you have gone over. If I can answer any questions about this, let me know. Send me a message or fill out the Contact Me form. I will ask The Accountant and get back with you.
If you do not currently have a budget, I want you to look at yourself in the bathroom mirror and say, "Today, after work, I will make a budget for myself." If you're married, put your hands gently on his or her shoulders and say, "Today, we need to make a budget. Its important." Feel free to insert whatever disgustingly mushy nickname you have for your spouse, if you like.
Dave Ramsey has some other really great resources on his website regarding budgets. If you have a good 30 minutes of downtime in general, I really recommend checking out the entire site. Its a really great resource for money management.
http://www.daveramsey.com/tools/budget-forms/
Not having a budget is just letting your money run wild, without any guidelines. Its a lot like if I let my two young children go unattended in Target. Obviously, I would never do this. However, let's imagine what that would be like. Anything and everything Elmo would be open in the toy section. I'm sure they would be chugging chocolate milk and feasting on Teddy Grahams in the grocery department. Then, they would head on over to Electronics to play with the iphones and download kid's apps. It would be complete and total chaos and I would be standing there with my jaw open, trying to clean up the mess and pick up the pieces.
Having a budget means that we can see exactly how much we're spending, where we are coming out ahead or where we are falling behind. If one month, I go over my budgeted amount on clothing, I can take that into consideration for the next month and make the changes to be sure that this doesn't happen again. Furthermore, it means that I don't wake up one day and wonder where all of our money went or wonder who ate all the Teddy Grahams.
In our house, the budget is the law. If either of us want to go outside the budget, we must have the other person's permission and we must "sleep on it" or wait 24 hours until we make the decision. If for some reason, we don't have 24 hours, then we walk away entirely.
Having a budget might feel like a major restriction at first. However, in the end, it feels reassuring to know that we can pay all of our bills, have some money to pay off debts, or have a little extra cash to treat ourselves and go out for dinner.
I hope everyone likes my new website! My old one was stuck in 1995! Lol. Here, you can sign up for email subscriptions, contact me and connect with me on Facebook! That lowercase "f" in the upper right hand corner will take you straight to my Facebook page. Also, if you like what I'm writing, tell your friends. Don't keep a good thing a secret! Thanks!
Going to the movies now-a-days can be quite expensive. On average, a ticket is going to cost $9 per person. And if you're someone that wants to snack while you watch, you'll pay even more for that. Last night, we took our entire family to the movies for just $4.50. How did we do that? We went to "The Dollar Theatre" here in our area. Discounted movie theaters are located all over the country. They show movies that aren't brand new but aren't out on DVD yet either. We took the kids to see Planes and we all loved it! If you or your kids are fans of Cars, then you'll like this one too! Our dollar theatre has plenty of films to chose from and they show films that adults or kids can enjoy. Also, we never pay extra cash for those 3D movies. It's unnecessary, extra money spent. Plus, it's hard to watch your kids with those dark glasses. With my luck, our toddlers would be running up and down the aisles! We ate dinner before we left the house so that cut out the need for snacks. Each ticket was $1.50 per person and our youngest was free because she is still under the age of two. This gives you a grand total of $4.50 for a great family night out!
Last year, The Accountant and I went to the library and picked up a great new book. It's called The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. While we are not completely debt free, this book helped us pay down a significant amount of our debt and stay focused on our goals of living sensibly. In a nutshell, here are Dave's 7 Baby Steps: 1) Create an $1,000 Emergency Fund 2) Pay off all debts with Debt Snowball 3) 3 to 6 months of expenses in savings 4) Invest 15% of income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement. 5) College funding for your children 6) Pay off home early 7) Build wealth and give At this point, we are still on step two, working hard to pay off our student loans. This is our only debt other than our home. This past summer, we paid off $5,000 on one of my student loans. You can only imagine the happy dance we did! Dave recommends cutting up all your credit cards. We just could not do it. Although, we went down to one card for each of us and it's only used for gas and emergencies. Nine in a half times out of 10, we use debit, cash or check for purchases. It just feels more significant paying with these methods and I found that we used our credit card less often. Another concept we just couldn't get on board with was Dave suggesting another job or source of income to pay off debt. Our family has one car, two kids under three and The Accountant works at least 50 hours a week. It just was not possible. However, The Accountant interviewed and was offered a new position out-of-state. Therefore, we decided, for financial and many other reasons, to make the big move. On Monday, I'm going to go deeper into budgeting: what exactly is in our budget and how we decided on the dollar amount!
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