52 Week Money Saving Challenge

It’s the beginning of the new year and there is always the hype of starting something to better your lifes. Be it working it, eating right or in our families cause: budgeting. While I spending mindless minutes browsing Pinterest I came across this 52 Week Money Savings Challenge. We decided we are only in our second week of January we are going to take on this challenge. How about you? Source

 

Day 1 Budgeting

My husband and I have never budgeted. Our whole 3+ years of marriage, we’ve just spent and never really told our money where to go. That way has helped us little and we have just been getting by, which was ok when we had two incomes. But once Sweet Baby came and I quit my ‘professional job’ for lying around (ha! I wish) and being a stay at home mom, we have learned we need to do something different. We have family who follows the Dave Ramsey lifestyle so we ‘know’ all the correct answers and how we should be doing it-but we don’t really know. Finally when the bottom dropped out we realized we seriously need to budget. No more checking into our bank and wondering, ‘where did our money go?’ We are taking  charge and telling our money where to go. This month seems the worst to start being smart about our money. We love buying gifts for others. My hubby loves being able to spoil me. Our first step was: make a budget. So we pulled out Dave Ramsey books, DVD’s and all the resources online. They have a few budgeting tools for free and we used the zero-based budget tool and within 2 hours we had a budget in place. It was hard and we both got grumpy at times. And we had to remind ourselves that the first 3 months are going to be the hardest, but we have to do something! We have budgeted a small amount for Christmas gifts for the family-time to get creative!