Budget

I am anxious by nature and therefore like control in my life.  It can manifest in positive ways.  I tend to be organized and good at planning.  But I can also freak myself out and be stifled by the fear of the unknown.  So of course, as we began the conversation of me staying at home, I needed to quantify the possibility with a budget.  And straight to a spreadsheet I headed.  How would it be possible to cut our income in half?  Would we end up living in a box?

We have done many things to cut down expenses and I will be sharing those as I go.

The most important thing we have found with regard to a budget is to be honest.  We took a hard look at our spending and tracked it through mint.com.  Love Mint.  We could then pull averages for costs such as groceries or eating out.  And thankfully there was room to trim in many of these areas.  It wouldn't be easy but I was up for the challenge since it was a part of my new job description.  Knowing that my ability to stay at home rides on our finances keeps me nice and motivated.

After we had a realistic idea of our spending we started to look at ways to save -

Child Care 
Man, kids are expensive!  One of the main costs we cut was the cost of child care.  Our second mortgage as we liked to call it.  And truly it was.  Going head to head with the cost of our apartment.  Two children in child care, which we had done before, made my full-time job close to volunteering.  So with the cost of child care out of the way by pulling Ivy out and keeping Nilsa home we were left with a little breathing room but it wasn't enough to make ends meet.

We also found that we would indulge in babysitting quite often.  I think it's an important thing for us to do as parents - to work on our marriage and have a break.  But it's a cost that can be brought down with less frequency.  We also had been paying for after school care for Sanne but no longer needed to now that I was at home.

Groceries
Holy Moses - why were we spending so much money on groceries?  I have several theories on this.  One was that we would run into the store when we needed one thing and end up spending $40 and some change.  We also would buy more convenient foods because let's face it time is money.  We have now cut our grocery bill almost in half.  I now average spending $50-$75 on groceries per week.  I'll save how I have saved this much for another post.

Debt/Savings
We are hoarders with our savings.  This is probably a good thing in some respects but then we also have some debt hovering over us.  So we took a look at what made sense to pay on and what made sense to save on.  I would still like to meet with a financial advisor on this to really get a better understanding.  We also opened up savings accounts through ING for each of the girls so when they receive money as gifts we can have a place to be putting it specifically for each of them for when they are older.  We also designated a savings account for vacations and one for emergencies.  We seriously have like six savings accounts (hence the need for a financial advisor).

Anyway, that's the general low down on the start of the journey.  The next step was the implementation and that's where this blog comes in.  I'll be sharing different tricks and resources that have allowed our family to move from two to one income and live more with less.