Answer to Questions

 Our beautiful sister Azure had some really good questions 

1.     How do you budget for the items on the right? Do You just carry over the envelope amounts from the previous months?

a.     Yes, we do carry over the envelopes amount. For example clothes. When we sat down to think about how much money we were going to give each envelope we looked at clothes and tried to remember how often we shop for clothes and we also took into account our budget to see how much money we had leftover after paying tithing, savings, rent, utilities. Lets say we had $1,000.00 leftover so we divided that up into Entertainment, Gas, Groceries, clothes, housewares, gifts, cosmetics, haircuts. Ok, after we got that divided up, we gave ourselves $77.00 dollars for clothes, each getting about $38.00 a month. The list on the right under CLOTHES/SHOES has more items then $38.00 worth, so if I want to buy my $89.99 Steve Madden shoes I’ll have to save my share of the clothes envelope for 3 months in order to afford them. Which is pretty ridiculous because I need other things and I can’t wait a whole year to buy all that stuff if I took that route. My purpose of listing the expensive Steve Madden Shoes is so I can find them cheaper on-line or at Marshalls, Ross, T.J. Max and post the cheaper price compared to the $89.99 price.

b.     Another example, we need free-on and a new window motor for our civic but we only budget $58.00 a month for Car Repair/Tires. So the motor costs $75.00 dollars at a junk yard (note: we’re buying it used)  and we have to add in the labor costs so we’re thinking $150.00 total max. We’ll have to save 3 months worth to pay for the total.

c. With the digital camera we'll have to take whatever is left from the blow envelop every month until we've saved up the correct amount.

2.     What is the title of the Dave Ramsey CD/book? Are you still attending a class or 
just doing the workbook and listening to the c.d.'s

a.     The books and c.d. titles are located on the right, along with his website link. We are still attending class, at the local Christian church down the street. It’s a 13 week course and we are on the 6^th week going onto the 7^th and the course will end some time in November. We meet at the church and they own the teaching kit which comes with DVDs of the seminars he gives live. We watch one seminar every Wednesday and it’s always a different lesson. This past Wednesday he gave a lesson on Insurance. He told us which kinds of Insurance are a bunch of bull and which kinds are smart to have and he explained that life insurance is not permanent like we all think it is. I do listen to the c.d.’s in the car so I can a very good comprehension of what he's talking about, and if anyone wants to borrow them and burn them, you’re welcomed to anytime.

3.     Are you guys vegetarian? (from Blog "Penny Pinching in the food dept.") 

a.     No, I picked out the meat from the soup so I could put it in the rice to have a meat with rice meal, because we didn’t want soup for dinner and we didn’t want rice by itself, and we didn’t want to go grocery shopping because of insufficient funds so we just picked out the meat to mix in with the rice to attempt to make a dish.

4.     The Cherry Blossom Festival:
That will be awesome if you come for the cherry blossom festival, and we’ll be able to budget that in somehow. I’m thinking we’re going to have to add a separate envelope for this and calculate how much we might spend on food, hotel, transportation, and souvenirs. Oh, and how can we forget? Tickets to see the different historical sites. So we’ll have to research prices for the attractions, and call Dave Keithly and ask if we can crash at his place for free! :) Hehe.

5.     Christmas budget: is a combined budget with gifts for all year round which means we’ve estimated how many gifts we give including: baby showers, bridal showers, weddings, Christmas gifts. Along with gifts we put Christmas in the same budget so we can budget for food, decorations, traveling, gifts, a Christmas tree, whatever. This year since we started to budget for Christmas in September we wont have enough to get us to CA or have spending money while we’re there. If we had budgeted for a Christmas trip since January then it would have been more of a possibility. SO you don’t have to plan your trip around us.