I'm a stay-at-home Mom. I've done a few things here and there to try and help us out financially but in reality pretty much everything we have is based around my husband's paycheck. My husband isn't some big-shot CEO or stock-whiz-kid. He's got a pretty average paying job in i.t. So things are tight. Right now the economy is set up where expenses are based on a two-income home for families.
So how do we do it? Well, there's a couple of things that have helped. I'll be honest that our families and others have helped us out in the past and still do in some ways although thankfully as time has gone on we've been able to do more on our own. Another thing is that thankfully neither of us are big spenders. Two of the biggest things though I believe are that we follow the commandment to pay our tithing first and that we've learned to make budgets and stick with them.
I've seen a lot of tips and tricks and such for dealing with finances but over the next while I'll be trying to do a post a week about the lessons we've learned along the way in hopes that it can help another family out there too!
The goal for this week is pretty simple. For this week go ahead and figure out what your family earns in a month. Then figure out what your family spends in a month. Right now you might not have a detailed accounting of what money goes to food, gas, entertainment etc. Don't worry about that if it's not there - go with what you do know. You probably can find power bills, phone bills, credit card statements and the like without too much problem. Write all of those things down somewhere or enter them into a database. Once you've done that, it should make it easy to find out if you're making more than you are spending. If you are - don't worry, we'll get there! The important thing for this week is just simply to learn where you stand right now!
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