taking another look at money

Again, one of our goals before we start to try for a baby is to get to a place of financial independence and freedom. 

FOUND HERE

What does that look like?

For us, two married mid-twenties Engineers, it looks like a beautiful color coded excel workbook. If Ben could find a way to program it into MatLab, I'm sure he would. But I'm the over-scheduler and controlling type, so I get to set the program and excel works great!

First off, kudos to those who have actually successfully been able to budget their money. We have tried, and tried, and revisited our budget and the only thing that worked or clicked for us was to make general "buckets" for where we spend our money. Using this book (please buy, it's amazing!!) we took a look at our monthly spending (joint and individual spending) and put them into either "Must haves," "Wants," or "Savings" using the "All your Worth" method. Again, buy the book. After looking at two months of spending we were at 50% Must Haves, 42% Wants, and 8% Savings. it should be a 50-30-20 ratio. Basically, it proved that we were overspending and not saving.  This awful revelation, led us to where we are today - and cemented the idea that you can't save money when you constantly owe it.

Back to the excel sheet. We keep track of 3 things: DEBT (every credit card gets a separate excel tab). STUDENT LOANS (I get a tab of all my loans and amounts, Ben gets one too). SAVINGS (a tab dedicated to the ways and specific amounts we need to deposit each month to get to our three months saved salary goal). That is also our ranking of what to work on first (credit card debt) and what to work on last (paying off student loans comes after building up our savings for us).

Then I get real nerdy and for each credit card (and really every loan/savings is tracked this way too) I put the starting month and the statement amount for that month. I then estimate that if we pay off $XXXX amount each and every month, when we should pay it off by. We started with our smallest credit card to work on first (yay small achievements!).

The biggest and only rule to follow is to  

STOP USING YOUR CREDIT CARD. 

seriously. no amount of bonuses, miles, or cash back 

make up for carrying a balance and interest due.

So we started this journey of financial freedom March 1st, 2013, and as of May 2nd, 2013 we have successfully paid off our Bassett Furniture card, my Citi Credit Card, and are now working on our final beast - our joint Chase credit card. We have a solid, totally do-able plan for building our savings and have been really amazed at the amount we were able to pay towards these cards (like, 3 months ahead of schedule, amazed). 

Stay tuned for some specific tips we used 

to clean up our "Wants" spending 

as well as tackling the awkward joint vs individual 

bank accounts when married problem.