Airing Dirty Laundry

I've given it some thought and decided this blog is useless without revealing our income. I feel pretty weird about it, but since no one is reading anyway, who cares. Last year we clocked in a whopping 32K for a family of four. As I mentioned previously, we supplemented that with our little savings until that was all gone. Now we are living paycheck to paycheck with about $250 in savings. In our hayday, a short two years ago, we made $55K a year and were way comfortable, at least in retrospect. So there you have it - context.

Coke Machine Without Coke?

WTF? I'm at work. I'm prepared to drop 70 cents for a can of corn syrup and to my dismay, there is no coke! Two buttons of diet coke, two buttons of coke zero, some gross fruit drink and water. I've been buying coke at this machine for 8 years! It's as if I've been jilted. Rejection goes both ways - I pushed my dollar into the nearby snack machine and spent all 100 pennies on some kettle cooked artisan potato chips.

I am never going to balance our budget if I continue to buy food from vending machines. I ate my chips and vowed to bring snacks from home.

Today's Ledger

$1.00 - potato chips

Wonder Wallet, Activate!

Welcome to the inner workings of my wallet. In an effort to make budgeting interesting, I'm posting every cent that goes out of my wallet, the whole whowhatwhenwherewhy thing. Everyone, as of late, seems to self-indulgently blog as if the whole world is listening, why not me? If it motivates me to take a critical look at my spending behavior and work toward paying off some debt, all the better.

To give you the rundown, I'm married with two kids, ages four and one. I'm a (barf) stay at home mom who works two days a week. I say barf because as much as I love my kids and have no problem with stay at home momdom, I, personally, don't enjoy it. I'm sure you will hear more on that later. My husband works long hours that should be reserved for very important and highly paid people, not retail sales guys.

My husband was laid off in 2007 and we drained our savings maintaining our lifestyle while he looked for a job with equivalent pay. Big mistake, that job never materialized and our savings were pretty meager. I looked at going back to work full time, but holy hell, two kids in daycare in my area costs around $1600/mo! And that is just for a three star place, I didn't even look at five star centers. Seeing as how my education and work experience qualifies me for jobs that pay around 20-24K, working could very well cost me money. As it is, I'm fortunate enough to have a sister who can watch my kids one day a week and my husband takes over on the weekend.

So that's the background. Here's where we're at: we have about 112K left on our 123k mortgage, 26K in student loans and about $1500 on a credit card. I'm hoping to have the credit cart paid off by the end of the year, but coming up with an extra $166 per month will be no small feat for us. Godspeed!