This is harder than I thought.

Alright let's try this again. You may be wondering why it's been over a month since my last blog post. The answer is simple: GUILT.

Last month was our first month of trying our new Plan, and it was certainly a struggle. Thanks to my consistently entrepreneurial husband (who manages to make money appear out of his ears when we need it most) we managed to meet one of our goals (paying $1,000 on our car instead of the usual $473 with the intention of paying the car off in year), but we certainly did not limit our spending to $700 and we didn't put any money in savings. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Today is May 4 and it's a new month, and I'm going to get back up on the horse and try again. But I think it would be wise to look back at the month of April and see where we failed.

1. We made an impulse buy on bikes. Yes, we've been waiting two years to buy new bikes. Yes, we'll have them for years and we'll make good use out of them this summer. But we didn't have the money saved before we went out and bought them. And although we managed to pay off the credit card pretty much right away, we could have waited and we could have thought harder about whether this was the right decision.

2. I went way over budget on groceries (I say "I" because I'm the one that primarily does all the grocery shopping). The goal is to limit our monthly grocery budget to $300/month. In March, we spent $393 on groceries. Not too bad considering we hadn't even started our Plan yet. Then last month, even with the Plan in place, I spent a whopping $459 on groceries. It started out pretty good, but by the end of the month I lost all motivation to eat generic raisin bran and enriched white bread. Yuck. Eating healthy and affordably might just be the biggest challenge for us.

3. We failed to cut back on eating out. There isn't much to say about this, other than we need to have more self control.

There's one thing that we did right. Or rather, that Steve did right. He managed to land two fairly large pottery orders and he also sold a bunch of crap we had laying around the house on Craigslist, which was primarily the reason we were able to pay such a large sum on our car and buy new bikes without breaking the bank. But we need to do a better job thinking wisely about what to do with the money he brings in from pottery sales and also what we call his "extras" (community education classes, picking up an extra class at school, payment for being the department chair, etc).

I came very close to giving up on this blog. But maybe the fact that we weren't actively thinking about our finances towards the middle/end of April was what caused us to fall of the wagon. Continuing to write about our failures and successes will hopefully keep us more on track.