Okay, you didn’t actually offer, but y’all did weigh in on yesterday’s money discussion, so I couldn’t help but wonder (name the reference): how do you handle savings?

I don’t come from a Savings Family so I can’t really do the whole Saving Thing the way my family did.  Like a good portion of the American public, they paid their bills and took out loans and mostly lived paycheck-to-paycheck.

Like a good portion of American kids, I want to do things a little better than my parents did, and so I want to save.  With a plan.  And less stress.  Because right now I’m saving but with a whole lot of stress.

To-date, I’ve either not saved (bad Marisa) or saved big lump sums into one single account.  One single account is fine when you have one single-minded goal (“pay off debt!”), but a little confusing when you have many goals.

Take our situation as a good example.  Once we pay off Joey’s car, things will change.  He’ll be going back to school, we’ll have no debt except the house and my truck, and we’ll be less into PAY EVERYTHING OFF and more into MANAGE EFFECTIVELY FOR A WHILE.  A long while.  Multiple years, years that will likely bring us lots of changes like children and, well, children.  {Could there be any bigger changes?  Unlikely.  Okay, maybe, but let’s not think about that for now.}  We’ll be a one-income family for the most part, and thank gawd my salary has increased so that it’s just about the same as our joint income.  With one less house (pleasegodpleasegodpleasegod) we should be fine but we’ll have a bunch of different goals: upgrade the kitchen, prepare for a baby, go on vacation, buy guns (kidding, though my husband would be thrilled).

So back to the savings: do you save into multiple targeted savings accounts, and if so, how do you decide how much to put into each one?  I get the concept but am struggling with the mechanics.  And hey, while you’re at it, any suggestions on how to be happy and united while one spouse is a full-time student and the other isn’t would be fabulous!

I’m a smart woman.  I know this.  And yet, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around my husband’s money management system.  It seems simple enough, but when I’ve tried to apply it to my life, I get stuck.

His method: every (weekly) paycheck, he deposits a fixed amount into his bank account and pulls out the rest in cash. Bills get paid automatically when they’re due.

So many parts of that sentence tripped me: Every. Weekly. Deposit. Fixed Amount. Pulls out the rest.  In Cash.  Automatically. When they’re due.

See?  Almost every word.

My method: every (every other week paycheck), I pay a different set of bills and adjust my budget accordingly.  One paycheck pays the mortgage, the other pays everything else, and twice a year I have a “bonus” paycheck.

Because I don’t get paid on the same days every month, and because Comcast totally sucks and manages to change my bill every month (despite having the same services every month), I don’t do automatic deposits.  Yes, I’m the one in this relationship that prays to the gods of bank balances when she checks hers, but I’m also the one who doesn’t trust the whole auto-pay thing.

~~~

For a couple of increasingly important reasons, it’s very important to me that we combine our money.

1 – I make more than he does. 

I think I’m more uncomfortable about this than he is, frankly, but I hate the imbalance.  It feels very awkward, and if I wanted to be awkward about money the rest of my life, I wouldn’t have minded dating so much.  Also, I want us to be making the right decisions for our family, and that’s hard when you’re staring your single life in the face.  Who wants to make the choice to make no money for a while when right now you’re making some money?  Not your single self, that’s for sure.

2 – He’s going back to school in the fall. 

To-date, he pays his bills and I pay mine.  Sort of.  We have two houses, so he pays for his bachelor pad and I pay for the one we live in, but it’s roughly equitable.  That goes out the window when he goes back to school, and I’m already anticipating the skyrocketing awkwardness.

3 – I’m sick to death of the “who’s paying” arguments. 

I don’t care what you say, he who pays for the thing has more leverage, and if not more leverage, more resentment. I see it in myself and I hate it, so, I want it to go away.

4 – Our goals aren’t always clear because we each target our money for different things, leading to nasty surprises.

We’re both pretty responsible money managers, but simply because we don’t share a budget, I feel we don’t always have the same micro-goals.  Macro-goals, sure (we both want to buy an island and retire in comfort, like, tomorrow) but micro-goals?  Sometimes not so much.

~~~

So having decided that combining our money was very important to me – and finally being at the point in our marriage where I recognize and respect that it’s not as important to him – I decided to cave on the money management strategy and go with his.

Setting the whole magical math aside, it sounded easier.  Well, except for the part where he does math in his head based on the day of the month every time he checks his balance, but since we’re using his account, he’ll keep doing the math.

Plus, since I no longer have an overabundance of time during the day (though I do manage to find time to blog, don’t I?), I’m finding it hard to do all of the things that my money management strategy requires, at the time it’s required.  Like paying bills and doing a budget before I spend money. *gulp*

And, I really liked how having goals and sharing a budget helped us feel like a team.  I would like that again, but without clear targets (like paying off credit cards) we haven’t been as diligent.

~~~

This Friday will be the first paycheck on this magical money system (which I should admit is actually quite simple: take fixed costs for the month, divide by two, and add one instance to seed the account) and I’m pretty excited.  Some goes into his account to pay the big fixed bills (mortgage, insurance, truck payment), some goes into my existing account to pay the smaller semi-fixed bills (utilities, Comcast, various subscriptions), and the rest goes into my new account. 

At some point I’ll add a direct deposit to savings, but for now, I kind of enjoy writing the savings check to myself – and depositing it in a real bank with real people like a real adult – so I’ll keep doing it until it doesn’t work for me.  And I should probably make the bill-paying part automatic, but first I want to make sure money goes where it’s supposed to.

See what a grown-up I can be?  {As long as I don’t tell you that the real reason behind making a change now is that I’ve run out of checks at my old bank and don’t want to order more.}

Anyone else end up going with their husband’s money management system?

I finally bought The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, Gretchen Rubin’s book about a year spent trying to positively impact her happiness.  (Note: her blog is great, too, though I do really prefer the book.)  The chapter that intrigued me most related to money, because I’m (still) trying to get my money habits and feelings under control.

One of her resolutions is to “spend out,” meaning the use of spending to enhance her life and happiness.  In her research she finds that some people are maximizers, needing to make sure their purchases are the best possible options, while others are satisficers (yes, spelled just like that), who buy as soon as their requirements are met.

I’m a maximizer.  And like Gretchen, I tend to not buy things I need just because I don’t want to.  My husband, on the other hand, buys a ton of everything so that he’ll “never have to come back here again.” (Italics mean there’s some serious whining going on.)

The best solution for the money leak that happens every time we go to Walmart is to not go to Walmart. 

Enter Alice.com* – like FreshDirect for household stuff.  (Or, for non-NY’ers, like Amazon for household stuff… which makes me wonder if I could have just done this on Amazon.  Oh, well, too late.)  And while this next excerpt makes me feel like I’m on an infomercial, I want you to know what Alice.com is for the next part of my story:

Scratch Household Shopping off the To-Do-List

Alice provides you a better way to manage all of your household essentials online. You tell Alice what you buy—choosing from great deals on 1000’s of products—and Alice goes to work. We organize all of your products, find coupons and deals for you, remind you when you might be running low, and help you order just the items you need so you can avoid that trip to the corner drugstore or the big-box store. And all this convenience comes direct to your door with free shipping included.

Get Big Box Savings & Free Shipping

Best of all, you won’t over pay for the power and convenience of Alice. In addition to free shipping on every order, you’ll find great prices too. That’s because Alice isn’t your average retailer. You order from Alice just like you would a retailer, but behind the scenes we work like a marketplace, allowing participating manufacturers to sell directly to you.

The irony is that in order to avoid the dreaded Walmart, I just spent $150 on every possible household item we might need over the next month.  The only two I couldn’t get were peanut butter and cat litter, so I’ll probably still go once or twice, but I can sneak in the garden center and avoid taking my husband.

That’s the paradox: to eliminate the slow leak of money during many, many (too many) trips to buy supplies, you have to suck it up and hand over a big puddle of money all at once.  And maybe not get the best deal on an individual item.

It took me two days to build my order and another to actually submit it. This after weeks of debating over the idea.  I just hated spending that much, all at once, on two and three dollar items.  It kills me!  But I’m tired of running out to get toilet paper and spending $50, so this is the new plan.

On a neighbor’s recommendation we’ll also be trying A Dinner Afare this week.  You pay a ridiculous amount per meal (like $15, which is crazy for eating at home) and have to spend a couple of hours putting it all together, but then all you have to do is yank one out of the freezer in the morning to have for dinner that night.  I’m not sure we’ll continue, but I figure anything’s worth a try.  We spend very little per item (because I’m cheap) and yet we still spend a ton of money on food, never mind the messes we create while cooking.

And actually, I’m seriously debating going on a bricks-and-mortar store shopping fast.  I’m more meticulous when I shop online, make better decisions, and choose the things we really need – but I get overwhelmed by choices and never hit the trigger.  I wonder if refusing to go to a real store will force me to get over that AND get my budget back on track?

Spending more to spend less.  That’s today’s paradox.  Do you ever do it?

Time to seriously consider Netgrocer. 

*I need to point out that the link includes a referral code, so if you decide you want to try Alice.com, please follow the link and then I’ll get a referral bonus.  Lest you actually believe I spent $150 on some newfangled thing just to make money off you, I’ll remind you that I’m horribly cheap and also ‘fess up that I tweeted a request for someone to send me a referral link so they could take advantage of the bonus.

My mom once told me that I’d know I was a grown up when I didn’t see anything but gray.  I thought she meant hair, but no, she meant life.

Nothing is ever black or white; nobody is ever good or bad; we’re not only wrong or right.

In October we were giddy with the success of our debt repayment plan.  We celebrated, lost focus, and are only now recovering.  I couldn’t bring myself to face my spreadsheet until today, it was that bad.  Not that we’re using credit cards or spending wildly, only that we could have been so much farther along.

I finally hid the columns and decided to move on.  Whew.  Turns out celebrating’s bad when it comes too quickly.  Had we spent years digging out of credit card debt, the successful habits would have been more deeply ingrained, but it only took us a few focused months, and once we celebrated a little, we got back into our old habits.

So there’s a contradiction: to succeed at finding balance eventually, you sometimes have to give it up for now. 

That’s true at work, too.  I’m traveling a ton – in fact, I only got home from my Wednesday through Friday trip last night – but it’s oddly relaxing.  I have a lot of time to myself and with people, don’t have to balance the demands of my personal and professional lives, get to think about nothing but work for days on end.  Then when I’m home, I barely keep up with my Blackberry.

Day to day, I’m not balanced at all, but over the course of a week or two, I feel more balanced than before.

I’ll be blogging more about balance and contradictions over the next few days; lots of time in airports = lots of thinking about life.  For now, I’m home, in my favorite ski pants, getting ready to meet my husband for lunch.

We still haven’t nailed the new job details.  As of now, I’m doing it in acting capacity, the job was posted and I applied, and 10 days from now they can make me a verbal offer.

We’re in agreement on the team (mostly), the goals (mostly), and the start date (um, a month ago).  I know they need someone in that role ASAP (you know, because I’m doing it and holy hell it’s a doozy of a situation), that I’m unusually qualified for this type of role, and that I make quite a bit less than my former peers, much less my current peers.

And yet.

I’m chickening out of negotiating.  Or rather, delaying the inevitable.  For the third time my new boss asked what I wanted and for the third time I rather elegantly put him off… but I suspect that’s not going to last much longer.

I think it’s a chick thing to be spending my time convincing myself my skills aren’t really that unique or necessary or important rather than convincing myself (and my company) of my worth.  I mean, really, it’s ridiculous.  I just spent the week at a client site in a kamikaze kind of a situation and handled it rather brilliantly, if I do say so myself.  I got kudos from one of our execs and appreciation from a general manager, and yet, here I am dwelling on the fact that, unlike my peers, I’m not an engineer.

Hello, crazy woman: you are perfect for this job because of the things you do that are unique for an engineering organization. 

Unlike 95% of my group (engineers, remember), I like customers.  In fact, I like unhappy customers most.  I am willing to travel on two days’ notice, have a background in services and development, and know enough about hospitals to talk my way through almost any ugly situation.  And I’m willing to take this job without a full team behind me, unlike most normal people who would prefer to be able to direct the work of the people doing the work.  Not me.  I’m good with a small team of a couple of people.

Somehow, though, that doesn’t feel as relevant as having once been an actual coder.  *sigh*

What now, then?  A script.  I’ve read too many studies indicating that women make less money because they just don’t negotiate (not “negotiate better,” “negotiate at all) to allow this chance to pass, but I’ll continue to chicken out.  So I’m going to write out a script I can follow when the new boss asks me, again, what kind of salary I’m looking for.  I’ll include things I can say for any number of his responses.

Want to help?  Here’s what I have so far:

Him: blah, blah, blah, salary, blah, blah, same page, blah, blah, might not get exactly but close, blah, blah, what are you looking for?

Option 1

Me: Would you mind telling me what range you have in mind?

Him: Yes, sure, we’re thinking xxx to xxx. {within my goals}

Me: That sounds like a fine starting point.  I think we should be able to come to an agreement once I have an offer in writing.

~~~

Him: Yes, sure, we’re thinking xxx to xxx. {not within my goals}

Me: Well, that’s a bit lower than I was expecting, frankly, given the amount of responsibility and impact this role will carry.  Given the travel requirements and visibility, I’d expect more like xxx.

Then what?

Option 2

Me: Well, given the amount of responsibility and impact we’ve discussed, I think xxx,xxx sounds fair.  I can start right away and have an immediate impact on your work and those of the development teams. {Is that last sentence even necessary?}

Him: That sounds fair.  I’ll talk to HR.

~~

Him: That’s higher than we’d normally pay, and anything above a 10% increase requires the approval of the HR board.

Me: Okay, I understand.  When will that happen and is it retroactive?

~~

Am I supposed to be prepared to defend my position?  I assume yes.  I have reports from Payscale.com and Salary.com indicating what I’m asking for is slightly above median… but that’s a pretty significant jump from where I am.

I hate this stuff.  Something about talking about money gives me the heeby jeebies.  I’ll negotiate almost anything else – and enjoy it – but this I’m just not good at.

The problem, I think, is disappointment.  Dollar figures are so black and white, so clear who won and who lost.  I feel like I’ll spend a week convincing myself I’m worth xxx and then be disappointed when I settle for a lower offer, even though it’ll still be a raise… you know?

Anyone else struggle with salary negotiations?  How do you get through it?

Remember this post, about being in control of money and having a budget and paying shit off?  November and December threw that all to hell, and I can’t wait to be back in the peace of not spending money.   Crazy, but true.

The holiday season is tough for me, my stressed spendthrift self warring with the indulgent generous one.  I LOVE to give people gifts, HATE to spend money, LOVE to wrap things, HATE to pay for them…. I just know I’m going to regret spending that dollar later, but then I throw it all aside to fork over the ten bucks for the latest cool razor my husband will use until he has to buy new cartridges (we never get around to that, so then he’ll buy a different razor when he can’t stand the itchy beard). 

Ten bucks, people.  I called a freaking razor a stocking stuffer.  (Lucky for me he won’t mind.  But wrapping the shaving cream might have been a little over the line.)

To top it off, my husband’s birthday is in early January, so I have to come up with a gift idea less than two weeks after Christmas.  The idea isn’t the difficult part; limiting myself to an acceptable cost is.  Actually, deciding what an acceptable cost would be is the toughest.  This year I’ve wanted to buy him a Wii (and extra controllers and games and such), take him snowboarding, spring for a trip to DC… and I think we could surely afford any of those if I stopped accidentally dropping a hundred bucks on a quick trip to Walmart for cat litter.

So here I am, on Christmas Eve, putting a plan together so I can get back to breathing normally.  Here’s hoping it helps!

To avoid the accidental purchases of somewhat-necessary but mostly-optional goods that make my quick trips ridiculously expensive: Alice.com.  Yep, I’m going to give it a shot.  When I lived in NYC, I had groceries delivered once a week, significantly cutting down on my grocery budget.  Let’s hope this service works similar magic on toiletries, because coupons just didn’t cut it.  (I bought a bunch of name brand crap I wouldn’t normally buy.  Everything either sits in a closet for some day in the future when I might need a shot of energy drink – not – or made me fall for high-priced brands I’m loath to buy again.)  Also, a trip to Walmart should not count as shopping; let’s stop pretending.

To prevent the feeling that a hundred bucks will change my life: automatic savings withdrawals.  Does that make sense?  We make way too much money for me to feel as strongly as I do about a hundred dollars, never mind a thousand.  People call into Dave Ramsey’s radio show and he says, “$1500 would change your life, wouldn’t it?” And it would.  But it shouldn’t change my life, not with the number of dollars coming into and out of this household.  So I have a savings goal of $10,000 for 2010 – straight savings, not vacation money or fun money or vet bills money.  My theory is that if I have money just sitting there, hanging out, patting me on the shoulder and telling me it’ll all be all right, my stress about the ten dollar razors will lessen.

To deal with kitchen-avoidance and restaurant-regret and fake-food-weight-gain: a limit on the number of meals we eat out.  I like to cook.  I like to eat the food I make.  We have a chest freezer full of frozen stuff, magazines chock full of yummy looking recipes, and this.  And yet, my default reaction to being hungry is to go somewhere, for two reasons: 1) the kitchen is trashed and I have to clean it before I’ll cook in it (is that a woman thing, because my husband will prop a cutting board atop a stack of dirty dishes?), or 2) the experience of eating out with my husband gives us time to talk and catch up (usually, unless the restaurant has a TV, in which case my hopes of getting through a conversation is nil).  But when we eat most meals at home, I feel better.  The kitchen gets used (and cleaned), we spend less money, and we’re more satisfied with our meals (and waistlines).  And I need to stop eating my way through my income.  So we’ll go back to eating out for one lunch and one dinner a week.  The bonus: we can spend more on a single meal that way.  Yay, sushi!

To manage the fear of future vet bills: fewer animals, pet insurance, and a pet care fund.  We have eight animals right now.  Yikes!  Five of them are permanent family members; three are “bonus.”  It’s time to kick Operation Finding Bonus Dog a Home into high gear, decide whether the two black cats would be better off in another home, and suck it up and pay for pet insurance.  Every animal will get their own Health Month in which they’ll be vetted, shot, and manicured.  We can handle one every other month.  On the off months we’ll stock up on pet food, dog chews, and critter preventative – so each month will have the same amount budgeted, see?  {Side note: anyone want a sweet dog or a pair of nice but feisty black male cats?}

And… to feel like we’re just a bit more in control of everything: a family budget.  First, I need to be more stringent with my own budgeting, but then… then I need to convince my husband that we should have a plan for his money, too.  Wish me luck.  We’re at a better place in our relationship than we were right after we got married (and I tried and failed), so maybe we’ll succeed this time.  Let’s call this a bonus goal, though, just in case.

Along with the many other things I learned by having a wedding (I need to finish my recaps, I know), I figured out when and how to let go of a budget.  The assumption, obviously, is that I actually have a budget to let go of, which I (usually, generally, mostly) do now.

My stress levels hit a high the week before our wedding because little purchases kept coming up that couldn’t be helped.  You need ten power strips to make sure you have music, you don’t really have time to shop and compare and go the cheapest route, you know? 

We hit the same thing on the other house and I struggle mightily not to give Joey a hard time that we need to buy another $50 worth of plumbing supplies just to get finished.  You can read about that recent epiphany here (poor hubby, had to deal with all the pressure and frustration plus me).

And now, with the holiday season, we’re in another one of those “can’t be helped” situations.  I’m trying to learn a lesson here, because I firmly believed you are blessed with multiple opportunities to find a graceful way to handle things until you finally do.  Put a less bright way: you are doomed to repeat the same frustrating cycle until you find a way to handle things differently.

I’ve decided while I can’t let go of my internal insistence on the most efficient or inexpensive route, I’m going to give us the freedom to spend less stringently until January.  Next year, we’ll need to do more advance planning, but this year, we’re in the middle of it all, and the project manager in me knows that when you’re in the middle, you throw the plan away and do your best.

Apparently this new quilt thing is a learning vehicle for me.  Love that.  As I’m making these labor-intensive gifts for Christmas, my brain is wondering if it would have been cheaper to buy them, if people will even like them, how much I spent on start-up costs and per unit – all financial calculations. 

Then I remind myself that life isn’t all about the financials.  Sure, some things are, but the value of a gift made by your sister (or daughter or aunt or daughter-in-law) is more than the sum of materials.  That’s what I’m giving: a little bit of my time and caring embodied in a blanket.

My paternal grandmother gave me a quilt years and years ago for Christmas.  We weren’t close, she and I, I don’t think she made it herself and for years I kept it around just because… but then something changed and I felt comforted by her presence through that quilt.  I think you have to grow into sentimental gifts, and I anticipate that as our family grows, these evidences of my family will mean more to me.

So this evening, when I’m making my fifteen hundredth trip to buy more quilt supplies, I’m going to be reassured that it’s not about the extra fifty bucks, it’s about five years from now when my niece or siblings or their children get cold, pull out a quilt they may or may not even like, and think of me.

And at least we have the money to spend, even if part of me wishes I got to save it.

 {Gratuitous dogs-and-husband-running-like-maniacs picture.  Just ‘cause.}

I get paid every two weeks.  When things are good and my life is under control, every other Friday finds me sitting in front of my spreadsheet paying bills.  Honestly, it’s fun.  I like to know what’s going on, like to feel like everything’s under control, like to update the numbers and see the total balances fall.

But sometimes, when my life is out of control, I don’t.  My call schedule pushes into the late evening, I still have hundreds of pages of documents to review, and I really want to go to happy hour.  And the bank has run out of the handy dandy little tiny checkbook registers, the ones tiny enough to fit in my wallet so that I actually bother to note what I’ve spent.

Also, I hate to say no to my husband.  I know, I know, that’s silly.  I’m neither his mother nor Santa Claus, but sometimes he mentions that he wants something and I volunteer to pay.  Most of his money goes to two places: Home Depot/ Lowe’s and eating out.  The former is unavoidable; the latter is mostly to please me.  I pay for little things that make him happy, even though he would happily accept a “sorry, can’t.”  Hell, half the time, he’s joking about wanting something or just mentioning it in passing.

Before I know it (except I have that low-level “uh, oh” stress going on the whole time), I have no idea what’s up with my account, except for being certain I’ve overspent.  Somewhere.  Everywhere. And that we aren’t making nearly as much progress on paying shit off as we should be.  The disappointment and self-recrimination are enough to make me give up…

… but I don’t.  I take breaks, I walk around, I blog, but eventually I finish, because I’ve finally learned that low-level stress is both avoidable and completely sucky.  I’d rather deal with the discomfort and get through it than live with the discomfort and avoid it.

Other things I should do but don’t:

• Return my dad’s phone calls.
• Call my husband’s doctor.
• Call my own doctor.
• Go to yoga. (I pay for the membership every month, but I haven’t been in almost a year!)
• Start working before 8.  (Okay, okay, NINE!)
• Shower before I start working.
• Pay in cash.

So I’m curious: are there things you know you should be doing – for your mental, physical, emotional well-being – but you don’t do them anyway?

Is that proper grammar or a “Southern saying”?  I think I’ve officially become a local when I can’t tell anymore. 

If you’re reading my blog directly on www.notquitebettycrocker.com this morning, you may or may not have noticed a new little widget in the right sidebar.  Yes, I have gone to the dark side and put an Amazon Affiliates widget on my blog.

This week I ordered a Kindle (yes, early, but my husband agreed!) in preparation for a business trip to Seattle.  As I was perusing my bookshelf with downcast eyes – feeling like a total cheater – I realized that in the hundreds of books I’ve read, a few stand out as books I would recommend with absolutely positively no qualms.

I had a brief conversation with my conscience and decided that yes, I could do this – even via an Amazon Associates’ widget – in good faith.  I love them, I paid for them, and I have recommended them in the past. 

Anything you see in the “I Own (And LOVE!)” widget is something that I paid for and love and would recommend wholeheartedly.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding to that list, so if you’re bored or looking for a good book, check it out.  {If you have a dog and feel like you’re not in control of your life anymore, check it out now.  Really. Go.}  Every book I’ve ever recommended here or at Repeat Bride will eventually make its way onto the list. 

But if you don’t wanna, you won’t hurt my feelings.  I promise.

Note: I certainly did not pay full price!  I generally buy books at Knoxville’s fantastic used book palace (hi, I’m a nerd) at a deep discount, but periodically I fall prey to the wonder that is B&N’s merchandising and pay full price.  Hence the Kindle: $9.99 to read new books?  Yes, please!  I think I might take my Kindle to B&N and snicker while I buy books on my Kindle that they’ve enticed me into wanting.

I figured you wouldn’t mind if I made a few cents (quite literally) if you happened to follow the link to buy the book.  And you can figure that I don’t care if you buy it through that link or buy it at a used bookstore.  I might care a little bit, though, if you pay full price because I’m cheap and I want you to have extra moneys to spend on hookers and blow (it’s a joke between my husband and I that I will happily delete if anyone’s offended).

I am toying with the idea of adding another widget with everything I want (and neeeeeeeeed!).  If you buy it before me, I might get a few dollars, but more importantly, this way I can induce you to buy it first and let me know how it goes.  I am sneaky that way. And it will remind me where I want to spend my money so that I don’t blow it (you know, on hookers and blow). 

But I haven’t decided yet.

Indy thinks I should because then maybe he’ll get this bed instead of the little tiny cat bed he had to use this morning.  Poor guy.

Uh, huh.  Right after I took this picture I let him out of the office and he climbed right into our comfy king-sized bed – under the covers, head on a pillow, snuggled up like it was his job.  I suppose it is.  And we don’t do big dog beds because the cats pee on them and then the floors get ruined and we can’t sleep for days because we’re all worked up about it.  But you get my point.

I will make this promise: if I don’t pay for something of my very own volition, I will tell you.  And you already know to assume that if I buy something I probably didn’t pay full price (hi, I’m cheap!), but not because I’m one of the cool kids, only because I’m cheap enough to refuse to do otherwise.  {Thank you, Amazon, for dropping the price of the Kindle by $40 the week I bought mine.  You made me feel like I got a deal even though I really didn’t.  And although you price your books at $9.99, you continue to show me the full price so that I feel like I got a deal.  You really are good at keeping my feelings in mind.}

Speaking of feelings, if any of this feels smarmy and icky, let me know and we will discuss.  I don’t want you to stop reading about the mess that is my life because you feel I’m trying to sell you stuff, mkay?

(Gratuitous puppy picture.  I realize he doesn’t look at all like he’s having an epiphany.)

I didn’t get it before, this thing Dave Ramsey always says about how getting in control of your money “changes your family tree.”   My credit card debt stayed under a thousand dollars, I didn’t go crazy when I bought my truck, and I have a great salary.  How could paying off a relatively small amount of debt CHANGE MY FAMILY TREE?

I assumed it was hyperbole.

But after three months of doing this whole money thing differently, after six paychecks on this debt snowball, after what ended up being slight behavioral changes (but admittedly huge philosophical changes), I get it.

We didn’t have a lot of money growing up. We weren’t poor (I don’t think), but we didn’t have money to spare.  My parents busted their butts to make sure we had what we needed and quite a bit extra, but as the oldest of my siblings I saw the worry and the stress.  I grew up knowing I’d find a stable, practical job and not have to worry about money.

But I mistakenly thought that “worrying” and “thinking” were the same. 

I spent most of my adulthood trying not to think about money at all, not knowing how else to avoid worrying.  But denial is not a happy place and much like learning that lies just aren’t worth the overhead, avoiding money isn’t worth the theoretical relief. 

Relief is knowing where I’m going to spend money and why.  Not worrying is having a plan that means my husband and I will be out of debt repayment mode and on to saving for emergencies mode far sooner than we’d imagined. And after that?  Peace.

I feel so silly being all evangelistic about this, but I honestly didn’t get the “financial peace*” concept until about an hour ago when I sucked it up, took a deep breath, and made my little spreadsheet look ahead. Not a lot, just a little.  And holy hell we might be able to hit our next target far sooner than I’d ever have imagined.

It works!  The snowball is getting bigger!  It freaking works!

I’m as surprised as anybody, frankly, and slightly embarrassed at the amount of money we used to blow. But hey, you can’t grow up if you don’t learn how to move on, so it’s onward and upward from here.  And as of this moment, my kids’ potential for knowing how to handle money – practically, simply, and without worry – has skyrocketed.

And we have changed our family tree.  Holy hell.

(Gratuitous kitty picture)

Tonight my husband and I will celebrate, something we’ve been fortunate and aware enough to do quite often lately. The current plan is to treat ourselves to the best steak ever (swear) at Ye Olde Steakhouse (rare prime rib thrown on the grill just long enough to get a few crispy grill marks with woodshed potatoes and a freaking beer), but if I know us, we’ll end up at home eating seven dollar lobsters and french fries with a glass of wine from the spigot. 

I don’t really care. For the first time in our relationship, we’re talking productively and successfully – and enjoying it, too — and about money, of all things, and it’s fantastic. This was one of the more difficult personal changes I’ve ever made, but also one of the quickest to pay off.  And it’s measurable.  I don’t think either of us could have done it alone, making this success that much sweeter.

(Gratuitous husband-on-honeymoon picture)

Okay, enough evangelizing.  Have a happy Friday, and a fabulous weekend!

*”Financial Peace” was Dave Ramsey’s first book; “Financial Peace University” is his multi-week educational program; and Dave’s radio show is broadcast from his offices at “Financial Peace Plaza.”

Updated: you can download a clean copy of my spreadsheet here.