Friday Finances

It is no secret that I am a Dave Ramsey fan and I would love to follow all of his principals. The only problem with that is that my hubby doesn't agree with him on everything so I have to compromise. It is not worth it to have a marriage issue over something like how much to put into retirement.

So what I first have to mention is that my hubby is not a big spender anymore and neither am I but we both have times where we really want a big item. Now we save for it and if we still want it when we have the money we buy it. The things we don't agree on are things like budgeting every dime and the amount of money that should go into savings and/or retirement.

I highly recommend reading anything by Dave Ramsey but I am learning to take his major principals and apply them as much as possible. So on that note I have done a lot of stuff this month to save money. I am learning to eat cheaper as this is a huge bill for me. I like to eat expensive meat like ground buffalo and steak. I am replacing some of the ground buffalo with ground sirloin when I find it on sale. It is not as healthy but it won't kill me to eat it sometimes. I am not good at cutting the grocery bill and I am trying to learn to do just that.

I have canceled my cable and phone so that saved $70 dollars a month and I quit selling Pure Romance because I am horrible at selling and I was just spending money approximately $50 a month. I have plans for joining a garage sale this month and I am giving up many of my treasured books. I am also planning to change our life insurance with term insurance so which will save us about 1000 dollars a year but I plan to take that money and put into an investment of some sort or towards the house we eventually want to buy.

I still really want to sell that duplex too because it is just such a big deal all the time. The good news is that the wiring issue I posted about yesterday is because my hubby who went over to fix the doorbell left some wires exposed and they just need to be covered wires. So the only replacement will be the wires for the doorbells. It will not cost a small fortune to fix the duplex. If we do all or most of it it will just be a few hundred dollars.

I have a good size savings that I have designated toward a house down payment and I was afraid that I was going to have to dip into that to fix things at the duplex. I have a 2 week check sitting here that should cover most of the repairs. It was going to go to savings but now it will go to repairs. No big deal since I only work 4 days in a two week period it will just take another two weeks to put that much in savings. Things could be so much worse so I am trying to be positive.

My hubby seems to be not so sure about moving far away now. We have a long way to go with saving and can decide that later. We live in an area hit hard by the housing market crisis so if we were to by some miracle sell the duplex we could find a great deal on a small version of the kind of property we would want and give it a trial run. We would have to commute to work a little further like maybe 30-45 minutes instead of 10-15 minutes. I saw a house with 2 acres for 80 thousand dollars only about 15 minutes from our house but I don't want to look too much just yet. We could raise some chickens and have a huge garden and still work our jobs and if we hate it we could stay where we are and just keep a small garden and just keep a few hens for eggs. 2 acres or so is still manageable as a yard and would be great fun for an additional dog.