Organization

Wow, has it really been November since I posted last?  The holidays really got away from me.  December was a rough month for us financially, but we came through it and I think we've learned some lessons from it.  I've put a plan into place to pay off all of our credit cards.  Hopefully that will happen in the next five years; sooner, if we can ever refinance the house.  Let me just say this right now, if you don't have credit card debt then keep it that way.  There are better ways to earn credit then a revolving account.  Much better ways.  We would have a lot more money in our pockets if we didn't have to pay so much in credit card payments every month.  They have gotten out of control.  Some of our minimum payments have tripled.  It's just not worth it.  We have also stopped using the credit cards.  It's tough to feed all these animals and still only spend the money when we have it, but we're getting there.  Which brings me to my main New Years Resolution: stick to a budget.

Budgeting means a lot of changes.  First of all, I've gotten back to keeping a ledger with my checkbook so I always know exactly what we have available.  That has really helped a lot.  I shouldn't have waited so long to start keeping one, but the computer that I had kept the ledger on finally bit the big one, so I didn't have much of a choice.  The Lord works in mysterious ways.  Second of all, that means translating that ledger to the  budget.  I'm finding that we don't spend the money on the things I thought we spent it on.  Too bad that also means we've spent more money in some areas than we should have.  I'm definitely working on that.  The tough one has been the grocery bill.  We have expensive tastes when it comes to food.  A couple of new resolutions have come of that.  First of all, only buy meat when it's on sale.  Second of all, stick to locally grown, in season vegetables.  That's easy since we have Beasley's around the corner; however, I am in the process of starting my garden in the next month.  We are also packing lunches and limiting dining out to only very special occasions, or at least no more than once a month.  It's also causing us to eat healthier which is never a bag thing.  I'm drinking water like it's going out of style.

But the biggest project of all it getting all of this organized.  Lately, we have taken to throwing all of our bills in the filing cabinet drawer.  Now I can't find a darn thing.  That's bad when I have medical bills that need paid off and I don't trust these people to apply my payments correctly.  So I came up with a great filing system that will organize our bills by payee and make everything easy to find.  The only problem is that I now have to organize two drawers full of bills (some dating as far back as 2002) and putting them into said files.  So guess what I'm supposed to be doing right now instead of posting this blog.  oops