Building Blocks are the foundation...

Surprises arise in life all the time, maybe your battery on your car dies (usually on a school run), or the washing machine blows up, that sort of thing.  Building an emergency fund purposely for these sorts of emergencies is key.  Lets face it we all have times that this happens but if we have an emergency fund this takes the stress out of having to find the money quickly.

Last May we had neither an emergency fund nor any savings and a credit card that needed paying.  I had a couple of large bills come in and I was in panic mode.  Thats when I stumbled on Dave Ramsey and his baby steps.  Really I thought, what harm could there be in trying it, couldn't be any worse than where I was at - so onto the first step we went.

Baby step 1 

$1000 Emergency Fund.

Do whatever you can to get together $1000.  Do it as fast as possible. 

I sold things I had laying around the house on a Facebook swap sell page for my local area.  I also sold a whole stack of craft items also on a craft specific Facebook sell page.  Never underestimate the power of these pages.  If you aren't a fan of selling on these sorts of pages then there is also "Gumtree" and lastly you can try Ebay!

Other ways to get some quick cash are:

* have a garage sale

* offer to do some babysitting

* offer to do some ironing

* offer your services mowing lawns/gardening

* cut back your grocery bill temporarily

* no spending on non essentials

* recycle your soft drink cans/bottles - here in SA we get 10 cents back for each bottle and can.

This Emergency Fund is exactly that - for Emergencies.  Put it in an account that is accessible when needed but not too accessible that you use it for eating out or other non essentials.

This is your peace of mind as you head into Baby step 2 - thats in the next post.

Chat Soon
Melissa

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Dining out on a budget...

Who doesn't love eating out?  If you have just started a budget with the aim to clear debt first then this post may not be for you, but if you have a budget that includes some entertainment then eating out may be a given.

We live in South Australia so things could be a little different between states.

We have a few ways of eating out that enables us to not have to pay full price.  There is no shame in only wanting to pay for one meal if they are offering it, after all the extra money stays in your pocket, they get new (or more) people through their doors as intended - a win all around if you ask me.

1.  Check out your local council paper (the one that gets thrown on your driveway each week) you will be amazed at what you may find.  In the picture above is a voucher for our local Primos Caffe.  Buy 1 meal get 1 free, there were 3 of these vouchers in the paper - Perfect for a budget friendly dinner out.

2.  Supermarket receipts - on the back of your receipts sometimes you will find "buy one get one free" meals for nominated hotels.

3.  IF you are in the position to purchase then The Entertainment book is also great value.

These are just a few ideas, if you have anymore in your local area feel free to add them below, the more that is shared the more everyone benefits!

Chat Soon

Melissa

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The Entertainment Book

Each year in April a new Entertainment Book is released.  The usual price you can get it for is around $65.  Sports venues, schools and other organisations use them for fundraising if you purchase through them.  Not only do you get some awesome deals inside but others benefit from you buying also.

Some of the Benefits from this book are listed below.

Restaurant Vouchers

 up to $25 - $40 off total bills

including many buy one get one free deals

Casual Restaurant Vouchers

 buy one get one free, $20 - $30 off total bills

Informal Dining

 examples are  McDonalds, Boost, Noodle Box etc - Buy one get one free's

Arts, Sports and Attractions

  Reduced price tickets for cinemas, Reduced prices for things like Golf,  Swim centres, museums and more.

National Retail

10% off selected E gift cards

                                 5% off E gift cards for Woolworths/ BigW/ BWS/Dan Murphy'

 ...and much more

Retail and Local Services

5% off Drakes Supermarkets

   Up to $10 value off Chemist Warehouses (best place for cheap Chemist items)

   Discounts for Auto, Shoeshed, Vineyards, Sportspower, Fitness Centres, Dry Cleaners, 

Travel

up to 15% off Gold Coast theme parks, Offers for Car Hire, Offers for Hotels, 

These are some of the benefits to purchasing this book, however it is only useful if your budget allows it.

Chat soon

Melissa

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Envelopes - plenty of them

I love paper, the smell, the feel, the different textures, I walk into places like Kikki K just to window shop and look at all the pretty papers, journals, planners and everything else they sell.  I have yet to buy, its not in the plan - YET!

I do use an envelope system though for my budgeting categories.  I first started out with ordinary envelopes from the supermarket, with my budget category scrawled on the front.  I wrapped a rubber band around them all to keep them together.

No longer.

Now I use Dave Ramsey's Money Wallet, I am in no way affiliated with him but I loved the wallet.  The cheapest place I found it was from "The Book Depository"  It cost $22 I think with free postage.  But it does take a couple of weeks to get here as they are in the UK. I haven't had it long, but if I am in this budgeting thing for the long haul then I needed something a little more sturdy (smile)

Here is the size of it against my mouse.

Inside the wallet has a note pad, a pen, extra envelopes and a clear pocket where I keep any loose change during the week.

It's really quite compact  

One of the many pockets labelled ready for the next fortnights money to go in.

Categories like Food and clothes that I need every fortnight are in here, If you don't like the actual envelope system you can set up one electronically.  Find a bank that lets you have accounts with no account keeping fees, and you can have as many accounts as you need for your envelope system.

If this is out of the budget literally, then my standard supermarket bought envelopes with a rubberband work too.  Also another great idea is little photo accordion albums.  In South Australia they Usually can be bought from Cheap as Chips, The reject Shop, sometimes Kmart.

 Chat Soon

Melissa

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Moving along....Main Budget

Did anyone else get a shock when they added up their bills for the year?  I did (smile).  It was an eye opener I must say.

Once that was done I got to move on to the actual budget itself - allocating every dollar.

This was a little tricky when I was trying to work out how much each category should have.  The bills category though is taken care of, if you followed my post HERE you will know what I did to reach that.

Everyone's budget will be different, if you have children, or no children, if you have medical expenses,  single, married and so on.  

Here is a very, very basic budget which started me off. I probably used it for about 2 weeks then I had to go deeper, this just didn't work for me.

Notice the old fashioned pen and paper ha ha ha, hubby made me a spreadsheet recently, but I still use this hand written way!

This below is my new budget that I use every single fortnight.  It really doesn't need to be anything fancy or expensive, a pad of paper and a pen does the job!

You will notice that we don't have a category for credit cards.  We no longer have credit card debt,  we cut our limit on the one card to $500, We still don't use it, once we have saved just a little more we will cut that up and continue to ONLY use cash.

 FORMULA

We list our income at the top.

For each category we add the amount we need to cover each category.

Once listed we then minus the categories from our income.

This should result in a Zero balance.

BUT IT DIDN'T

   Our balance wasn't zero,  it was time to go back to each category.

This is where we fine tuned our budget. We took out things that weren't necessities.

You will notice there is no Entertainment category here.  We very rarely went out, well we hadn't since May last year, its starting to get easier so that category can now be added back in.  But it was a choice we had to make, so that was the first thing to go

Secondly was our food budget.  We culled that right back.  I will do a post on how I keep my food budget at $100 per week a bit later.

So you get the picture, wherever we could make cuts we did,  until we got that balance at zero.

Other things you can do:
Renegotiate Utilities, phone plans, cut foxtel and so on...

Next came  the hard part came - sticking to it.  It was probably the hardest part of it all, especially at the start.  We said no to a lot of things, but we got through it and while our budget is still tight, its tight by choice as we save.

I will be back tomorrow with how I sort my fortnightly budget using an envelope system.

Chat soon

Melissa

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Plan Plan Plan

Welcome back.

That super cute little notes clipboard I purchased at our local Kmart for only $2 - Love it.
Note: I am definitely not an expert, nor do I have a degree, however the way I Budget works for us and our household,  and I like to think it is a simple way to get back on track.  I realise it may not work for everyone!

My first real post and I thought I would do this one separately - WHY?  I gathered all my bills and accounts etc for a whole year and this took some time, so I will give you some time to gather all your information.

I will be honest with you, about May 2015 I stumbled across Dave Ramsey.  He is an American Finance Author.

A lot of what he has to say is plain common sense but it works, it really does, I won't say it is easy to get started.  It may well be one of the hardest things you will ever undertake.  It was for me, those first 3 or 4 months were painful (smile).

Dave Ramsey advocates 7 Baby Steps. But before you get onto baby step 1 you need to create a BUDGET - don't you just hate that word?  We will call it the "B" word (smile)

The first thing to do is plan, through the years there has been a saying that has stuck in my head: 

"Fail to plan, Plan to Fail" 

This couldn't be more true.  I wish I had taken a photo to show you the mess we had all over our dining table.  Scraps of paper everywhere. Why?  We were creating our first real budget in a very long time. By the time we were finished it was accurate right down to the last dollar. But it wasn't created without a lot of frustration on both my part and my hubby's.

Firstly:

  We took every single bill we have had over the last 12 months and put them on a pile. Some I didn't have paper copies for so I scrolled back through bank estatements.  If you still don't have them you may need to estimate them.

These bills were all added up for a yearly total.  We get paid Fortnightly in our home so I divided that total by 26 weeks. If you are paid monthly then divide by 12.

Total Yearly bills DIVIDED by 26 (or 12) = Total Bills Category Amount.

That was the amount that I had to put away EVERY fortnight without fail.   I did put a little more into this account initially to cover 1 month or else we would have been behind. This took care of our bills and 12 months on I have to say there is definitely a peace of mind each and every time a bill comes in now.

So grab yourself a coffee, a calculator and a pencil and eraser for those who do it old school like me, 

or if you are more computer savvy like my hubby then head to your computer and open up Excel(we use both methods here), we are going to make a start on creating a budget - yay!

I will be back soon to get moving past this bill category stage, we should knock the whole budget off in the next post I reckon!

To give you some idea,  here is my list of our yearly household bills we budget for:

* council rates

* Emergency services levy (this may just be a South Australian tax)

* House contents and building Insurance

* Home Alarm

* Car registrations

* Car Insurances

* Car services and wheel alignments/tyres

* Life Insurance

* Gas

* Electricity

* Water

* Phone/Internet

* Ambulance

NEW ADDITION: Foxtel/Netflix

I Hope that has given you an idea where to start, you need to know exactly where all your money is going if you are to do this accurately.

Chat Soon

Melissa 

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Just budget and Stuff - Welcome

WELCOME!

I have been thinking for awhile now about sharing with everyone how I have gone about cutting expenses over my whole family budget.  

I have always budgeted, I mean always BUT I haven't always budgeted well.

Before my son who is now 9 we were double income, no dependants, not much to worry us and we spent a lot - loosely following a budget.

By the time our son came along, and I left salaried work for part time work things were very very different.  We no longer had that double income to rely on,  things drastically changed with incoming monies but my spending hadn't so much.

Fast forward to about 18 months ago (and possibly turning 40 had a big part in this *smile*) I craved a change,  I craved savings in the bank,  I crave my mortgage paid as soon as possible, I guess I craved a different lifestyle to what he had been living.

Don't get me wrong I still want a lot of things - but by things I don't mean material possessions,  I mean experiences.  To have these experiences I need to cull my budget - which I have done and will share with you over the next few months or so.

So whether you need to cut your budgeting for basics/necessities or with an end goal of your house paid, a family trip, paid university for your children, whatever your goal may be hopefully you will find a few ideas going forward to help with that goal.  I welcome any ideas you have explored or may want me to explore, I am hoping that this section of my blog may help even just a few people reach their goals.

So pop back and visit,  I have a lot of ideas flowing around my head,  ideas that have previously failed, ideas that have worked or could work well.

Chat Soon

Melissa

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