A No Spend Month

HAPPY TUESDAY MAMAS! Time for....

Here's what you do:
1. Write a post about ANYTHING baby {or pregnancy} related.
2. Add my button to your post.
3. Link your post with the link-up tool found at the end of all of my posts.
EASY PEASY!

This Tuesday I'm not-so-much talking about "baby" stuff but instead linking up with my pal Erin to talk about budget and financial related things....which is totally part of being a mom, right?

Let me start by saying...

OH EM GEE, we did it! 

This past month Jason and I followed in the footsteps of my financial idols, Sallie & Perkins, and attempted a "NO SPEND MONTH". That meant NO meals out, NO shopping, NO Starbucks. NADA. The ONLY things we spent our money on this month were groceries {which I budgeted}, gas and our bills. NOTHING else. OK...that's a wee bit of a lie. I did book a plane ticket but ONLY because fares were starting to go up and if I didn't book it this month I'd be booking it next month. AND the couple of times that we enjoyed a meal out or I got coffee was done using gift cards from Christmas.

Before I go into the nuts and bolts of our financial plans for 2014 and the success of our first month of the year, I have to brag about my husband. Jason started a new job with the same company in October, a sales job, and since has been the top salesman on his team every single month. He has worked so hard and has won bonus pools, received extra incentives and has given our family much more flexibility in the budget department. I couldn't be more proud of him and cannot express how happy it makes me to see my husband working a job that he really loves and is absolutely dominating. Thank you honey. ♥

Last year, I shared my handy dandy budget spreadsheet that I use to track our spending. With an amped up version for 2014, we were able to lay out and budget all of our bills and our grocery costs for the month. I am absolutely tickled pink that EVERY.SINGLE.CATEGORY on our spread sheet this month is GREEN, meaning we were UNDER budget! To top it off 11 of the categories had a big fat zero next to it!

With all this extra money in our account we sat down and talked about our current debt and financial plans. We agreed to start the journey to "Financial Freedom" by way of Dave Ramsey. Our situation is just slightly different, however, because we are trying to save money for a down payment on a house while paying off debt. With that in mind I created a separate page on our budget spreadsheet to track our progress and keep track of our debt owed.
It looks like this:

I went through and entered what we have in our savings account, all of our credit card debt, student loans, car loans, etc., how much is in our 401k and how much is in Kenley's College Savings account. This gave me a great base to get our game plan set and I will update it each month with the new amounts / balances.

I am so proud to say that after just one no-spend month we were able to check step #1 off our list as well as pay off 2 of our consumer debts {paypal & a credit card}! That debt list and amount is still daunting but even getting two small balances off there felt amazing. We then took the paid off credit card as well as my credit card {which we're still paying off} and put them in an envelope so that we can't use them!

In addition to not spending this month, reaching $1,000 in our emergency fund AND paying off 2 of our debts, we took the very first steps towards buying a house! We now have what I call an "out of sight out of mind" bank account where we are auto-depositing a percent of our income to save for a down payment. This account isn't attached to any of our other accounts, so we can't easily transfer money out of it. As we pay down our debt the plan will be to add that extra money to the house fund!
Next stop....

via

It's really amazing to see how much money we can actually have when we don't spend it on frivolous things. I think we learned a lot this month and I look forward to using this new knowledge in the upcoming month.

To check out other no-spend month related posts, check out my buddy Erin's blog.