 My husband and I have a goal to be homeowners.
We made that goal not far into our marriage, and it’s one that we earnestly work towards. Some regular readers may be surprised to know that despite the details we have carefully parsed through in many areas of our finances, our homeownership goals are rather vaguely defined.
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 Alright budgeteers, you made it! You waded through the mother of all budgeting sessions, you set realistic but intensive goals, and you have probably achieved some and not achieved others. No matter how well or poorly you followed your projections from your last budgeting session, it is HIGHLY important that you follow up.
 This is the first of a three part series on frugal cooking. Want more frugal cooking content? Sign up for our monthly newsletter for one highlighted frugal recipe a month! So you want to improve your frugal cooking. (Or maybe just your cooking). In a break from tradition, I am not going to wax long about the benefits of home-cooked meals, their frugal nature, and how much better they are for you - you already know that, or you wouldn’t be reading this post. In this introduction to our 3-part cooking series, we are talking about one thing, and one thing only - adjectives.  After being married roughly a year, my husband and I had the baby talk.
It might have happened sooner, but there was quite a bit of chaos in our first year of marriage. Inbetween moving, healing, establishing, and communicating we just didn’t even broach the topic of a little tiny human until a year had passed. When I brought it up, my husband’s response was a flat “We are NOT having a baby right now!”.  Emergency funds are tricky things. While my husband and I steer towards the 6-8 month emergency fund mark, others are comfortable with the 3-6 month timeline that is most commonly recommended. Still others prefer to have a full year’s supply of cash on hand. Let’s walk through how to determine how much should be in your emergency fund.  Something that I learned very quickly in the three years that I taught music lessons is that the profession has significant seasonal fluctuations. There is a massive swell in September, when kids are going back to school and parents are setting up extracurricular activities, and another less severe swell in January when all of the Christmas gifts of music lessons come rolling in. Summer, though? June, July, and August are dead months. Even granting a “free” week a month didn’t stop me from losing students.
 I have talked the virtues of a budget up the wazoo. And it’s no wonder - budgets do a whole lot of wonderful things for helping us know how to boss our dollars around! Sometimes, though, I talk about “the budget” as if it seldom, or never, changes, and that is simply not the case.  So we’ve talked about what a budget is and how to make one. You’ve set your goals, and you’re sticking to them! Between budgeting sessions, though, is the budgeting check-in. The purpose of a check-in is simple - account for the expenses you’ve had that day (or, for our pros, in the past week) and make sure you and your partner are on the same page.  Setting goals is at the heart of budgeting. Without well defined goals, Expenses increase and Savings decrease. So, let’s talk about how to set goals.  We are almost halfway through an arguably tumultuous year. With COVID-19 still uncontained in many areas and stay-home orders lifting rather slowly, life has certainly been unusual for the past several months.
While it is usually traditional to set goals at the beginning of the year (and I did, and my husband did, and we did together), I find a lot of value in quarterly evaluation of our annual goals. Even though we are a little early for our semiannual evaluation, I found myself pouring over them anyway. |
Mrs. FBI spend most of my spare time playing with spreadsheets, my violin, or planting vegetables in my garden in hopes of bringing new insights into frugal living. Please enjoy, and don't forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter here. Archives
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Disclaimer - Mrs. FB is not a financial advisor. Nothing in these articles should be construed as investment or other professional advice, but rather personal opinion. Some links in these posts may be to affiliate sites - no products are advertised through this site that have not been personally used by the FB family unless expressly labeled.
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