Archives for February 2011

The Dave Ramsey Envelope System – 4 Month Review

February 7, 2011 by Amy 4 Comments

So it’s been 4, almost 5, months since we started budgeting utilizing Dave Ramsey’s envelope system and 3 months since my last update. How’s it going?

Well, the envelopes are dead.

But not by choice. AND the budget is still alive and kicking.

About two months into using the cash/envelopes, which I LOVED, we had $100 disappear. I’m not going to speculate how it happened but the bottom line is the money never showed back up and I just couldn’t make myself risk it again. So for the past 2 months I’ve heavily relied on the Excel version of my budget as well as Mint.com to track all of our expenses but especially our envelope money. I log on nearly every day and, yes, manually enter how much we’ve spent. And I have to say, I like it. Yes, cash holds you much more accountable but doing it this way relieves all the headache of shuffling money around when you’re caught without your envelopes.

What I love is that budgeting has nearly curbed our frivolous spending. I mean, really. Sometimes I go all week without spending my blow money and now that I think of it, Scott hasn’t even asked about his in a few weeks. I didn’t buy ANY clothes for anyone in January. We had money left in our entertainment budget even though we went to the circus. We’re eating in much more and while I know I could save more money grocery shopping with coupons, we’re staying within our budgeted amount. By saving in these categories, we’re able to use the extra for things like unexpected doctor bills, pharmacy bills and guitars that aren’t in the budget without ever having to touch our emergency fund. I guess what I’m saying is I LOVE our budget and I really don’t know if I could or would ever live without one again.

In closing, I know I’ve plugged this book before but if you still haven’t checked out Jon Acuff’s new book Gazelles, Baby Steps and 37 Other Things Dave Ramsey Taught Me About Debt you should. If you are a Dave Ramsey-er it’s a must read.

A Little Hardwoods Miracle

February 7, 2011 by Amy 8 Comments

Do you ever just feel like God is on your side? Sort of a heavy/prideful thing to say but I feel like God is on our side with this whole addition thing. He’s just GOOD. I don’t know if it will always be smooth sailing but this morning it was.

Where to start?

Well, the plan for our currently carpeted hallway and the new hallway is to replace all that with the hardwood that is in the living room, kitchen, etc. That way, we can put carpet in the new bedroom and not have to re-carpet the existing bedrooms. I like carpets in bedrooms, what can I say?

Scott and I went to Home Depot last weekend to cross our fingers and hope that they still had our floors. Well, only 2 lone boxes sat there, one of which had been opened and was poorly re-packaged. We needed 5. We talked to customer service and apparently it was a discontinued item and no one in our surrounding area had anymore. Collective sigh.

I didn’t want mismatched hardwoods so we were going to go the carpet route but then we’d have to carpet all the bedrooms too so we didn’t have mis-matched carpet between the hall and the rooms. Yeah, I know we could, but I’d rather do it right while we have the money.

So this morning we decided to do a nationwide hunt for this hardwood. I did a nationwide Craigslist search and two came up! There were 30 boxes of 3/8” in Atlanta! Ours was 5/8” but we could supplement with wood and make it work. Things were looking up!

I called Home Depot to see if they could widen their search. It was out of stock online. I called locally they showed nothing in their system. I mentioned that we just saw it last weekend and sure enough after taking a look, those 2 boxes were there. I started asking him how else we could find it as we were pretty desperate. He seemed helpful and put me on hold to make some calls. Well. Turns out there was some confusion and he was looking at their 3/8”. He DID have SEVEN boxes of the 5/8” although we were sure we only saw 2 boxes last weekend. I sent Scott right over and sure enough, he said, the seven boxes were stacked right where we had looked. Plus, they were in fact discontinued so the sales lady let us have the seventh box we really didn’t need for half price. Not to mention they were ALREADY 40% off from being discontinued.

In short, we got MORE than what we needed locally for 43% off the original price. Can I get an amen??

Also, this is our first official purchase for the addition! Yay!

Change is Gonna Come

February 3, 2011 by Amy 6 Comments

Ya’ll today was kinda a big deal. In so many ways. Wanna know why?

The job

I applied for my job today. Not A job, but MY job. I’ve been a contractor for the bank for 10 years now but because of new rules, I can’t stay a contractor. So we’re looking to pull me into a full-time position. I will be upping my hours from 30 to 40 and some other minor changes but I’ll be doing the same thing with the same group. But as you might not expect, there is a lot of red tape to get MY job even though I’ve had it ten years. I even have to interview. So yeah, I applied for a job today.

The call

It’s official. I made the call to DSS today to schedule our orientation meeting. I actually said to someone official “we’d like one child, a 3-5 year old male”. Part of it felt a little icky, like I had just called a catalog order in but ya’ll, when I think about the fact that I just made the first phone call to find my son that is not under my roof, well, it’s a beautiful, big deal.

The house

The bids for the houses should be coming in today. So excited to get that ball rolling. And by the way, I think we settled on that last floor plan. It feels good after staking it out outside and staring at it for a few days.

The car

Somewhat less major, today we also had some car issues. We took the van in for a recall and asked them to figure out why our engine light kept coming on randomly and Honda wanted to do $2700 worth of work on it. Unfortunately $1500 of that is probably legit work that needs done.

Today feels like 2011 is going to be quite the ride.

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Also before I go, you just have to see this video about the Blood:Water Belt. Sarah, Amanda and Mandi had it at Blissdom and it put me in tears to think of all God has done with just an ounce of obedience. All the ladies that have it mean a lot but this is the first I’ve seen anyone talk about it with as much passion as Dani and I have about it. Three more ladies and we have over $2,000 raised! Consider joining?

Taylor Junior

February 1, 2011 by Amy 8 Comments

For a long time I’ve been wanting Emma to take piano but have been waiting for her to want to do it. Practicing piano is hard enough when you WANT to do it. Well, Emma has been BEGGING for guitar lessons the past few weeks. So we signed her up. She’s ECSTATIC. And I have to say, she looks mighty good with a guitar.