August Goals

July was a tough month, for obvious reasons!  August won’t be much better, with Back-To-School shopping for 3 children this year.  (Yes, little Bekah starts Kindergarten!)  Plus, Shaunna has Senior Portraits at the end of the month.  So I’m back to looking for ways to reduce expenses, especially since they cut all overtime at work.  [...]

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Dude, Where’s My Money?

Suddenly, I can’t seem to get my budget to balance.  My income has gone down and my expenses have gone up, but I didn’t think that it was going to effect me as much as it has. First, my child support has gone down $80-100 a month.  Jim had to pay arrears in the amount of [...]

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I hate grocery shopping

There.  I’ve admitted it.  It’s the first step to recovery, right?  Admitting you have a problem. I hate spending my precious time walking up and down aisles, comparing unit costs, figuring out if using a coupon for item X is better than buying item Y without a coupon. I HATE taking my children to the [...]

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The high cost of eating out

I decided that I needed to track my food expenses better.  I know I eat out too much, and I know that I go over my food budget month after month after month. In the month of February, I broke “Food” out into two separate categories – “Groceries” and “Eating Out.”  I spent more on [...]

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I screwed up

I got complacent with my budget.  I didn’t balance my checkbook last week.  I didn’t go grocery shopping last weekend, so I stopped at McDonald’s for breakfast every morning, ate out for lunch every day, and ordered Chinese one night, and took Shaunna out to Ruby Tuesday’s another. So when I finally sat down and [...]

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Do you ever do anything good for yourself?

I mean, really, really good, just for you? If you are a mom, you know what I mean.  Everyone and everything else comes first.  We go without in order to provide for our children.  Right now, I am forgoing my time in order to put in overtime to afford Back-To-School shopping for 2 of the [...]

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