I’m gonna get down and dirty here. One thing that I have been very guilty of is being overly optimistic about money. To be completely truthful, we have none. However, when we DO have some we tend to be a little less strict on our spending than we typically are. I think that’s fairly typical of people in our position.
I am going to be completely truthful about our budgeting right now, as i think we all should be. I think we all give this air of “everything is ok” and that’s not ok. We need to share our burdens with someone, it’s not healthy to live with that sort of stress. I’m not just talking about money either, i mean at all, in all circumstances. Maybe you have money but you are lonely, or are having stress in an area that you really shouldn’t be handling on your own. Talk to someone, please. Stress is not healthy.
This is our current budget:
$750 rent
$200 electric
$185 cell phones
$80 internet
$25 water
$85 car insurance
$200 gas for the car
$15 for trash (we pay $45 every three months)
then we have various other bills we pay whenever we have a little extra money
Thankfully we don’t have to worry about food anymore, although our food budget was never very large anyway. We were given $277 for food every month, although they gave us a month and a half to start. We have a full fridge and enough food to last us into the new year. The only thing we have to buy before then is the fresh vegetables. That’s it, and we still have over $200 left over to go into next month. I am thrilled.
We end up paying about $1540 a month in just basic bills and getting to and from work. C typically makes about $1500 when he is working full time. At the moment he is making closer to $800, which basically means we barely pay our rent. We also get $360 from my sons disability and i bring in about $600 from my work. right now we are basically scrounging to make things work, but we are still somehow able to save even little bits for our project. As it stands right now we probably aren’t going to end the month with $1500, but $1000 still looks very doable. We had great success with our fundraiser, which was really exciting and encouraging. This is my one stress, money. The thing that keeps us up at night.
Our landlord has been awesome and has allowed us to pay our rent in two segments during the month. We paid our second segment yesterday. After we got home C got a call from the property manager telling us he had to come over and bring us something. For about 30 minutes we were very freaked out that we would be getting an eviction notice. When he showed up at the door with a giant ham we just about cried. It was pretty amazing.
The point of this is: it’s ok to open up about your struggles. It’s ok to say, “we barely make our budget every month”. it’s ok. We plan on being very open with our budget not only through this whole process but from now on. We need to be in order to do what we want to do and teach people to stop being victims and start taking control of their lives and their finances.
This is our ultimate plan:
$450 mortgage payment ($50,000 at 15 years)
$185 phone
$80 internet
$85 car insurance
$200 gas for car
Which would be about $1000 for everything. This is a prediction of the amount we will be spending but we are hoping to be able to build the house with only a $20,000 loan, which would be closer to $250 a month. Plus our cell phones and internet should really be paid for by our businesses. Once again we are not counting food, however, buy this point we really shouldn’t be spending much on outside food. We will be spending money on growing our own but we aren’t sure yet what that will cost. Nothing near what we are currently spending though.
That’s a little more than one of C’s current paychecks to pay for everything. That’s exciting for me to think about. This is what makes me press on. We shouldn’t be making enough to survive, we shouldn’t be working to pay bills and everything else falls to the wayside. That’s not a life. That’s not living. We want to LIVE and show other people how to live as well.
$80 a month for the Internet sounds high, are you including basic cable TV?
Have you considered getting a discount by bundling your internet & cell phones with one provider? I would suggest that you look at your cell phone bill and cut back on any services that you don’t use very much.
I completely and totally agree. We spent 3 months trying to find cheaper internet service. We ended up going with at&t which was the cheapest, however the only way to wave the $150 installation/ setup fee was to bundle it with the tv, so we got the most basic cable package we could which adds another $5 on to our bill every month, eventhough we dont watch tv, except what we watch over the internet. We ddte same with our phones. We cut down to the bare minimum we could without compromising what we need to run out businesses.
We splurge a little more on internet and cell phones because we both own our own businesses which we run mainly via computer and our cell phones. We also pay for these out of our business accounts so they dont really count for monthly expenses, except when our businesses arent doing well enough to pay for them.
Well that makes more sense, thanks. I suggest that you keep good business records because the tax man is always trying to disallow deductions so they get more tax money from you.
Oh how right you are. We use a really good CPA . If you haven’t seen my post on quality you should check it out, it was one of the first. Anyway the reason I mention that is because that Is one area we aren’t going to cut back. We pay them about $350 a year but they are GOOD and totally worth it.