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.

Mint is Mint

Over a year ago, I stumbled on a fantastic money management site. The best part about it? It's completely free. (If you don't use online banking, pay bills online, or if you operate only in cash, don't bother reading further.) It's also completely safe. Just as safe, in fact, as using online banking - partly because you're not moving money around through Mint. It only displays what's in your various accounts. (More on safety features.)

Here's how Mint.com works and why it's so great.

After you sign-up (literally just takes a few seconds, requiring an email address, password and zip code) all you do is enter your account information from your various online accounts. This can be everything ranging from bank accounts to retirement accounts. Basically, you're registering all of your credit cards, loans, investments and bank accounts.

Once you enter all of your account information (again, I encourage you to read about the safety features!), Mint downloads all of the information, then categorizes accounts based on loans, credit cards, bank accounts, investment accounts, mortgages, etc.


Normally to the right you'd see how much is in each account and the balances of your loans and credit cards, but I can't share everything with the world.

Now you're ready to start playing around with Mint. Different features include a list of "Cash & Credit Account Transactions" so you can see what you're spending. From here you can categorize every transaction (like label something fast food, coffee shop, restaurant, utilities, car insurance, entertainment - you get the point.)

My favorite feature is Trends. You can compare what you've spent in a certain category from January 2009 to January 2010, or you can compare your spending to other Americans or Minnesotans or to people living in Duluth. But by looking at what I spent in Gas over a year's time, I can begin to budget exactly how much I need to set aside for gas every month.

There's lots of other tools on Mint to play with as well. Like the Investments tab shows you how your IRA is performing.

But when I look at this, I really have no idea how to decipher it. Can anyone tell me how my Roth IRA is doing? (It really is the least of my worries.)

Accountable to the World

I've never had much of a desire to start a blog. I've always felt blogs were a little self-serving, unless you're an expert at something, have a really interesting job or hobby, or you're an aspiring writer. And I'm none of these things.

But recently my hubby & I have decided to undergo a major financial renewal of sorts, and I've been a little obsessive (ok a lot obsessive) about our "Plan". For us, it's extremely ambitious, and by broadcasting it to the entire World Wide Web (or at least the few people that may happen to stumble across this), we are accountable to people outside our little house of two.

(Another reason? I need a spot to vent my enthusiasm for penny pinching, because I'm pretty sure my family and friends are going to quickly tire of it. This way, I'm not forcing anyone to be excited for us.)

Here are the deets:

Goal 1. Pay off our car in a year.
Two and a half years ago we bought a really expensive car. OK, it was a used 2007 VW Jetta, but the loan was over $20K (including a previous car loan we rolled into it-stupid), and even though we've been able to make the payments just fine, we've realized our money would be much better spent elsewhere.

Goal 2. Save $10,000 by March 2011.
Socking away $834 a month in a bank account we won't touch and have limited access to will hopefully get this accomplished.

Goal 3. Limit our spending to $700/month. (I told you it was ambitious.)
We realize $700 is practically nothing, even for just two people. But in order to accomplish Goal 1 and Goal 2, we don't really have a choice. That brings me to the bigger picture, which is why we're doing The Plan in the first place...

Our Ultimate Goals.
Move to our dream home, hubby quits teaching to become a full-time potter, and then (if we're ready) babies.

Also, I want to share our story about how we are making our life happen. And if we do it (and I really believe we can), then hopefully others will be inspired to make their life happen too.