Finances Part 2

Of course, finding out where your money goes is only the beginning. The next part is to control where your money goes. There are some things you simply can't control. You want to focus on the things that you can. This may differ from household to household. These are some of the things that I control.

Electricity - It goes without saying that you turn off the lights that you're not using. That will give you a little bit of savings. You can get further savings very quickly by seriously cutting down on your A/C use during the summer, especially if you use the window units. One window unit and a few fans generate less electricity than three window units. We're on the window unit system now, saving up for central air someday in the future. One unit takes care of the entire house, along with about four floor fans pushing the air around. It is my husband's pleasure to tweak the system until every corner of the house is affected. Now, not everyone can do it that easily. I live in a bilevel, so the lower floor is always cool and the upper floor has a ranch-like layout. Still, A/C during the summer really spikes the bill! August is my highest electricity usage month. (Now, in different climates there will be different challenges.)

Another important way to save electricity is to hang your laundry to dry. The washing machine takes up a certain level of electricity, since it's got motors in it. The dryer, though, dealing with both motors and a heating element, is a real electricity hog. I have a real, honest-to-goodness outside line that my husband put up for me. Of course, when you do your laundry this way you have to plan. Sunny days make excellent laundry days. Keep an eye on the weather, and consider a pre-emptive load if you're about to enter a week of rain. Hung laundry does not actually freeze until the temperature drops below 32F, and even then it might not if your line is in the sun. Hanging laundry can be done in my area from March through November, and a hung load in the June sun with a light breeze will dry in a little over an hour, which is about as long as it takes in the dryer anyways.

I could write an entire post on line drying. For now, let's move on.

Gas - Believe it or not, gasoline for the cars is the highest non-mortgage percentage of our salary, higher than food and significantly higher than the electric bill. My husband and I each own a car. I commute to work, and he used to use his to attend classes, as the college and workplace are a good 45 minute drive in opposite directions. There are a few things you can do to save gas, and the feasibility depends on your situation. Personally, I don't live close enough to any minimart or supermarket to walk instead of drive. 12 miles walk in July and the milk is already bad. So when I was home full-time, I'd try to consolidate my shopping and errands into one day each week.

It also helps, of course, to own a car with a decent fuel efficiency! Granted, my vehicle is old. It's an '89. It's a small station wagon, though, not a truck or an SUV. Some people do need trucks, but they generally don't make the best commuting vehicles, unless you're a farmer. My ancient vehicle gets 30mpg on average, and that's an actual calculation, not just taken from the GM website, where miles per gallon numbers are often skewed. If you're looking for a vehicle to ferry the kids around and get groceries, get a station wagon or a minivan if you must!

Food - Last but not least. This could use a post of its own, to be honest. Let me just say here that you can probably greatly reduce your food bill. Hey, I could greatly reduce my food bill. The trick is to pick lots of the simpler foods that can be cooked into a variety of meals and fewer 'special foods' that can't. Stock up on potatoes, beans, rice, and oatmeal, and ease up on the Froot Snax. One of the beauties of the American food market is that cutting your grocery bill will likely result in eating healthier and reducing waste costs, not shortchanging your family and ending up with scurvy. It takes a little while to learn the recipes that make up easily and quickly, but it's well worth the effort, and should not be considered too much of a bother for a full-time homemaker.

There are two simple tricks that can result in a smaller food bill and healthier family.

1. Buy on sale. Use 'them' coupons! A lot of stores will actually mail you their listing of sales for free, so that you can make up your list ahead of time. Until you get a good feel for when certain fruits and veggies come into season, it'll help you figure that out as well. By The Way, buying the fruits and veggies in season will not only lower your costs, but it will ensure a decent variety for you and your family.

2. Avoid packaging! The more packaging that's required for an item, the more wary of it you should be. Obviously, this doesn't count for matters of hygiene, like an extra wrap around your raw meat. But small granola bars in foil-lined packages inside larger boxes inside bigger boxes present more garbage than your own banana bread and probably have more unpronounceable ingredients in them, too.

I did finally get around to my bills last night. To my delight, I was able to pay off the entire balance of the credit card again. My goals for this month is to lower our credit card spending, using the debit/checking instead, and tracking my spending to see where our money is Really going.

Finances Part 1 - Analyzing

Either today or tomorrow I plan to do the monthly bills. Each homemaker works out her own system for bills, and mine is to collect everything that has come in from the previous month and settle it out all on one day. I usually deposit my paychecks (being the working person as well) by the first of the month and settle the bills preferably within the first week of the month.

Controlling the finances is one of the primary jobs that used to be standard for a homemaker. The wife always saved as the husband worked. Nowadays, even among stay-at-home wives/mothers, I hear that the husband often retains control of the finances. In this family, however, I handle them. Don't let your lack of control in that area provide an excuse to go soft on financial learning! You should know how to handle money, whether you do or not.

We were in bad shape for a while, since my husband was putting his tuition and books on our sole credit card. He has since switched to student loans, which do need to be paid off. I finally zeroed the credit card balance last month. Let's hope I can keep it that way! A credit card is not evil, and most of them offer at least a 30-day (some, a 60-day) grace period for purchases. I'll use it for online shopping or large purchases, with an eye towards paying it back in full at the end of each month. Never use a credit card as a loan. Don't put more on it than you can pay back each month. If you see something you want that will take a couple of months to pay off, for heaven's sake wait the couple of months and save up for it!

Saving, now that's another matter. It wasn't easy for me to get into the habit of saving. Nowadays, when I do my bills, I place a certain amount of money into savings and pretend I don't have it anymore. The amount that I impress upon my mind as what I have to spend is what is left in checking after the bills and savings have been dealt with. That's worked the best for me. My mother always said that you should have enough in savings to replace a car AND a major appliance, should they happen to go at the same time. I'm nowhere near that, as I couldn't save when I was putting all our extra money into the credit card. Now I'm slowly making progress. Both our cars are old, so I hope I will have the money to replace one before it goes belly-up.

Some people say you should have three months' income saved as your 'nest egg'. That's probably not a bad idea. Of course, being able to replace a car and a major appliance would take about three months' income for me.

I'm embarking on an attempt to keep track of all our expenditures for a month or two. It's tedious, sitting down once daily to remember if you've spent any money and where it's gone, but I hope it will pay off! I'd like to be able to show what percentage of money we use on things like electricity, entertainment, gas, and food. From there I may have a fuller picture of how to budget.

A simple budget is easy as anything to set up. My mother used to have me set them up in highschool, and I quickly started doing it just for fun. I start by listing all my bills, then making categories for each spending type. Then I do a bit of math to see how much money I have left over. I have mine set up in a spreadsheet file with formulas linked together, so that I can add the increased price of gas and my Required Income Level rises automatically.

We're probably considered a middle-class family. Of my gross paycheck, 6% goes to federal income tax, 6% to Social Security, and 5% towards our medical benefits. When the government is done with my paycheck and my healthcare benefits are paid, I have about 80% of my paycheck left. Out of that, about 40% goes to the mortgage payment. After my mortgage is paid, the next highest percentage of spending is gasoline for the cars. We spend more on gas than we do on food. This sort of breakdown not only helps you understand where your money is going, but it may inform your politics!

Next time I finish a post, it will probably be about the second part of finances, which is controlling what you spend. I could take my own advice a little better in this area...

Let's start with an introduction...

I'm 30 now, a wife (of one, of course!) and mother of a four-year-old boy. I live in a fairly rural area surrounded by small cities, so it takes about a half hour's drive to get anywhere, but that 'anywhere' contains just about everything I might need. It takes that long to get to the nearest grocery store, but I can also find cinemas, restaurants, hairdressers, clothing stores, and what I like to call 'weird stores' containing everything from herbals to goth jewelry to dragon t-shirts and more. I do my fair share of browsing in 'weird stores' and have a couple of favorites!

I currently work full-time as a 'software engineer', mostly dealing with reports and charts, mostly dealing with Visual Basic for Applications, Let me tell you now, if you are an aspiring programmer, never let on that you have a clue how to use VBA. You'll end up playing with Access front-ends and Excel auto-updaters for the rest of your career. Pretend like all you can do is Java and make them put their databases in Oracle, PHP, or something similar! Anyways...

The reason why I work full-time is because my husband was laid off over three years ago with no college degree and found it very difficult to find a job. In those intervening three years, he's attended college full-time and is now the proud owner of a Bachelor's in Computer Science, just like me! He's got... seven job applications he's watching, according to his whiteboard, and one at the point where they might give him an offer within the next few days, we sincerely hope. He's only been searching for about two weeks now, so that's not too shabby.

Full-time work in a cubicle environment has seriously not been good for my health. I don't know what is "wrong with me", but I've gone consistently downhill with various health issues since I started working full-time again. My little boy was only one years old when I started, and I've felt the loss of my homemaker status keenly. A social anxiety added onto that has probably contributed to the downturn. Right now I am just about at the end of my tether, with a case of gastritis that was diagnosed Friday by gastroscopy and a rather serious case (according to descriptions I've read on medical websites) of burnout. I'm on "Family Medical Leave", working until I feel too sick to do anything further, and coming home early each day to just sleep for hours.

I'm an INTJ by the Meyers-Briggs test. Although people might diagnose me as ADHD Inattentive, I've found my various foibles explained perfectly by "Dabrowski's Overexcitabilities". I'm 'overly creative' as I put it, with a deep urge to express all the things I see in my mind. That overflows into everything from writing to sewing to drawing with a love for just about any craft I come across.

I live in a bi-level, which is the proper name for the kind of home that people tend to call 'raised ranch'. The kitchen, living room, dining room area, etc. are all on the top floor along with the main bedrooms, and the other bedrooms and den are on the lower floor, half-buried in the ground. Our front door leads you to a small landing with a choice: Upstairs or down? It's a decent sized house, four bedrooms, and we manage to fill it with three people due to a packrat having married another packrat.

I'm starting at the beginning here, with a decision to assert my homemaker occupation despite my current status. Probably I won't get so much done at first, but I hope in time to transform my home from it's current state into something much cleaner and more organized, more like how it was before I started working full-time!

Last but not by any means least, I warn my readers that I am a Christian. How long has it been that this is something to warn people about? I know there is a lot of criticism against Christianity nowadays, and I've faced a lot of bitterly angry people simply by admitting that I am one. I might as well get that out of the way at the start! I attend a nondenominational church, a 'country church' of about 500 people with a pastor who is also a farmer who preaches plainly from the Bible. I would describe my own standing as "Prima Scriptura", which does differ from "Sola Scriptura." From the Wiki article:

Implicitly, this view acknowledges that, besides the Bible, there are other guides for what a Christian should believe, and how he should live, such as the created order, traditions, charismatic gifts, mystical insight, angelic visitations, conscience, common sense, the views of experts, the spirit of the times or something else. Prima scriptura suggests that ways of knowing or understanding God and his will, that do not originate from the Bible, are in a second place, perhaps helpful in interpreting Scripture, but testable by the Bible and correctable by it, if they seem to contradict Scripture.

Now that we've got that cleared up...

Today is a good day to start a new homemaking effort. My house is mildly cluttered in many rooms and badly cluttered in a few. A lot of the regular stuff has to get done. Today is Sunday, and I hate to use a Sunday for work! As a result, I won't be attempting any big work projects today. Instead, I'll content myself with making the kitchen clean and picking up around the house. I've got a lot to do...

A decent beginning

Ah, my very first post on a new blog. It's kind of like having a brand new notebook with nothing in it. It's always fun to write the first few words there.

This blog is here to encourage me to be a better homemaker. I've chosen that as my primary vocation, and I hope to settle more fully into the role in the next few weeks. I've found that a lot of women outside of my church have very little idea of what makes up a homemaker's life. It doesn't help that a lot of news media stories present a very biased view, acting as though homemaking is a last resort for stupid women instead of the intensely creative, demanding endeavor that it truly is. I'll describe a bit of the kinds of things I do in hopes that people reading this can understand some of what goes into what I do!

I should probably start with an introduction of me. I'll put that in the next post, so that it can be commented on separately. In the next few weeks, I hope to get my old website in order and my link list up, so that you readers can find out where I put all my various things online.