Web Hosting

I've found that a good website can actually be profitable enough to make it worth doing, especially if you are staying home with kids. It's something that can be done during nap time, and with scheduled posting a good long nap for both kids can yield a week's worth of content. I use website hosting because I'm not technologically savvy enough to do it myself. Check out webhostinggeeks.com if you're looking into paid blogging or another website that makes money. Paying someone to host your site that really knows what they're doing helps you to look more professional.

Dave Ramsey is always trying to get people to think outside the box and find unusual places to make a little extra money. While he does support moms staying home with the children, or just to be homemakers after the children are gone, he also encourages us who are in Baby Step 2 and 3 to be gazelle intense, and squeeze a little extra out of everything. For me that means doing some crafts and selling them online, and doing money making blogs. When you trim your budget down to nothing but the essentials, and then follow through on your budget, it's easy to see that even a little money here and there makes a huge difference. Back when we had no plan, I made substantially more money than I do now, but we never had any. Now we're living on 2/3 of my hubby's income, and the other 1/3 of his income and all of mine goes towards debt. It's nice to see some progress being made when we get those card statements in the mail.

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Dumping Debt

We reserved Dave Ramsey's dumping debt DVD from the library, and it came in. But the librarian forgot to undo the lock on it, total bummer. We looked online and it looks like you can undo the locks with really strong magnets, but we didn't have any strong enough.

We're still working the baby steps, and enjoying envelope budgeting. Especially since we came to terms with how much we really need to spend on groceries. Dave said on the air when I was listening a while back that a family of 4 can't eat for less than $600/month. That's good to know, since sometimes you read about people spending $25/week on groceries and I felt like I should be able to do that, as a homemaker. We spend $425/month, which does include a few nonessentials, like chips and one 18-pack of beer. But after cutting out sodas, fruit juice, and using dry beans from scratch a few times a week, this is just fine for us.

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Dave Ramsey's Grocery $

Thankfully as I've been listening to Dave Ramsey, he finally cleared up what his 'Beans and Rice' means. He doesn't mean literally beans and rice while you're getting out of debt, but just to pay attention to your grocery dollar. He said that no matter where you are in the country, if you're a family of 4 you should be spending about $600/month on groceries. I feel better now, since we're a family of 4, but one is still nursing, and we spend $425. After coming up short every month, I outlined all the stuff I needed to buy, cooking from scratch, and it comes up to $400. Then add in the incidentals like baking soda, spices, having friends over, and it pops up a little bit more. Good to know.

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Checking

We're moving our checking over to one that allows us to pull out all our 'envelope' (food, fuel, entertainment, household, medical, etc) money from the ATM since our local credit union has a daily limit that is kind of annoying. We're using USAA, where we also have all our insurances through, and have one credit card that has the lowest rate/highest balance so is last in our debt snowball to be paid off. They're great, they have the lowest rate for car insurance that I've found. I don't think their life insurance rates are the best, it sounds like Zander Insurance that Dave Ramsey supports would be cheaper, but hubby was none too happy about the whole 'physical' thing and I don't think he'll consent to go through it again. I suppose I could change mine, maybe I should call and see if it would really be that much cheaper. We have 100K on me, I stay home, 15 year term, and 250 on him, 30 year term.

I'm glad that I can get life insurance on myself. We chose 15 years because it's cheaper, and if needed I can renew it then. And also, likely if it was a real emergency (ya know, I think it would be if I DIED) my now toddler should be able to step up and 'do' most of what I do in 15 years. I'm not able to get disability insurance on myself, which is something I looked into because if I become permanently or long-term disabled, someone is going to have to take care of the kids. But they only cover loss of income for disability. Hubby does construction, and I'm pretty sure disability insurance is way out of our price range for him.

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Switching banks

With our envelope system, we end up withdrawing an awful lot of cash (for me, at least). Honestly, I feel like a drug dealer asking for all these specific denominations (this many 50s, this many 20s, this many 10s, this many 5s...) though the bank teller assures me that it's not abnormal. We do that so they split into the envelopes easily; ie 75 to Clothing, 300 to groceries but I don't want 100s, 250 to fuel but 20s are easiest to deal with there.

Anyway, with our local credit union I have a limit on our ATM with drawls; 200/day. Which would be fine, but I like to do all our envelopes in one day and I have a pretty strong aversion to unloading the kids just to walk in the bank. And I don't like going through the drive through, it seems to take quite a while. So I called our bank that we get insurance through, USAA, and switched our checking over to them. Seriously, now they own our life. We have life insurance, renter's insurance, car insurance, a (closed) credit card, and now our checking through them. But we can withdraw 1000 a day and they reimburse the atm fees for using other bank's atms. And we can call ahead and get the w/d limit raised if we're doing something like pulling out cash to buy a car.

We have to mail in our checks, but since we're not cutting it so close any more, the 3-4 day wait time for the deposit is fine with us. Honestly we end up holding on to our checks for 3-4 days anyway before we actually make it down to the bank.

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Credit counseling

I started back up in credit counseling yesterday. Hubby and I were re-going over our Dave Ramsey budget, and while we can make our payments on the credit cards, the 28% interest on First Financial is killing us. $80 in finance charges each month. We had been in credit counseling (we went through consumercredit.org) two years ago, but stopped a little over a year ago because we could no longer make the monthly payment of $400 or something like that. We sold some property, paid off a couple credit cards, settled with one, and now are down to First Financial, Discover, USAA, and Sallie Mae (student loan). First Financial is nasty nasty nasty on the phone, they do the good cop, bad cop routine, and if I don't pick up, they call and harass my parents. Which is illegal, but they do it anyway. So we're going to try and get the rate down so we can actually make some progress on the account and get them out of our lives. If it weren't for contacting my parents, I'd likely just let them go and settle with them after we get a tax refund (we're broke, so we get the 'un' earned income credit). But I don't want them to harass them, so hopefully this works and we can make some progress.

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