Our Electric Bill Went Down

 "You have received an eBill from Dominion Electric for account 0000000000 in the amount of $45.35. This bill is due on 11/09/2010. The due date stated is for your current charges only. If the amount due includes a previous balance, those charges may now be past due. If you pay by automatic bank draft, your payment will be made on your scheduled draft date. Please use the link below to sign in to view your bill for additional information."

Can you believe it???!!! Our electric bill was at $135.00 in August of 2010, then $119.00 in September, and now it is $45.35!!! I am so excited. We didn't suffer too much. We would bump the A.C. lower than 78 degrees when we had guests over. Beside that, we kept the A.C. at a constant 77/78 degrees Fahrenheit, I had the fan following me everywhere. We never turned on the lights in the day. We stuck to the natural sunlight that flowed through my windows. I had stopped using the dishwasher. period! I quit using the dryer except for drying blankets. I somehow found time to hang up the laundry and wash the dishes.
I unplugged everything in the household especially every kitchen appliance. I  unplugged our phone chargers every single minute they weren't charging our phones.

I put a power strip in our entertainment center.

Every single cord from the T.V., the X-box, to the radio was plugged into the power strip. Every time we finished using the entertainment center we turned off the power strip. Yes it re-set our clock on the radio and what not but we didn't care.






As well as the office, every single cord was plugged into the power strip and once we finished printing or using the computer, we turned off the power strip and every time we need to use it we dive under the desk to turn it on. Hey, a $90.00 savings does not make this ritual a hassle to me.

You Have a Right to Splurge... (NOT)

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I love love love Desperate housewives.  Marc Cherry wrote this episode especially for me. It's episode 3 of this new season called Truly Content. Teri Thatcher plays Susan, and last season ended with her finding out that her husband was $50,000 into debt. As a team they made the decision to rent out their house and move into a crummy apartment and live off of scraps in order to pay back his debt. At their apartment complex Susan's neighbor runs a cleaning business, but not the average kind. The maids in her business wear lingerie while they clean their own apartment as they are streamed live through a web cam. When Susan got a job offer she turned it down, but once she learned how much money it pays she was on board. As time goes by she is making a lot of money and getting really good at the job. Later on she wins a bonus for having the highest ratings out of all the girls. The Madam (business owner) tells her how hardworking she is and that she should treat herself to something nice, after all, she has the extra cash.
Coincidentally Susan and Mike's anniversary is that weekend and she asks him to take her to that really fancy place to celebrate and she assures him they have enough to pay for it.
Then in the laundry room she meets one of the other girls who works for the Madam. This competitive girl threatens Susan for winning the bonus and accuses her of stealing her signature move. Susan breaks into the woman's house to toy with her vacuum cleaner so that it will blow up in her face the next time she uses it. They get into a fight and the Madam makes them apologize. Once they apologize the competitive girl tells her she wanted the bonus so badly because she's trying to save up enough money to move back home to Virginia, (where I currently live) and she feels like she barely makes enough to get by. Then Susan said, "When I broke into your house I saw that you had a really nice things like a new flat screen t.v., a closet full of new clothes, it doesn't look like you're barely scraping by" the competitive girl replies, "I know, I just like to splurge every once in a while" and Susan says, "Yeah I get that" thinking of the plans she made to go to the fancy restaurant. Then they talked about their determination to save up enough for their goals by the end of the year and be finished with the lingerie cleaning business.
So then Susan asks the competition girl "How long have you been doing this" the girl thinks about it, and says she's going on 6 years and she didn't even realize. That's when it clicked for Susan. She doesn't want six years to go by and still be stuck in that scandalous cleaning business and not out of debt all because it's nice to splurge every once in a while.
When she gets home she tells her husband Mike that she prefers to order in Chinese for their anniversary rather than going out to the expensive French Restaurant.
Lately  I've lost my focus on our goals to save and getting to baby step #7 which is building wealth. I have to remember that once I reach Baby Step #7 then I can splurge every once in a while. I really liked this comment my most beautiful sister left that summed up my blog.
"We truly live in an entitled society when it is engrained in us that splurging every now and again is not only our reward but our RIGHT for working so hard. And what does it get us? It just puts us another step back into debt." -Irene Pacheco

We Broke into the Emergency Fund

This is a picture of our Baby Step 1 the $1000.00 dollar emergency fund. The stack on the right is going to pay the mechanic and the other stack is the remaining total.
It all started with our friend Jack who borrowed our car to go to D.C. for the last time.
We got a call when he was about 50 miles away when something happened to the car and it began to slow down on its own. We called our road side assistance had the car towed back to our apartment. We don't blame Jack  because the car would have broken down eventually since it's 14 years old. We're just glad that we weren't the ones stranded in the middle of a trip. For example we had plans to go to D.C. this past weekend and if Jack hadn't taken the car it would have happened to us on our way there which would have been a stressful experience.
Monday came and Shane took it to a shop one of our friends recommended. They diagnosed the car and said that the spark plugs were out which caused the ignition coil to blow up. We were thinking that it sounded like an expensive job to replace an ignition coil. Total cost of everything was $342.00. According to my sister she said that was cheap. According to me who hasn't had much experience with car repair, I thought it was expensive. It killed us to have to turn in 17 Andrew Jacksons ($20 dollar bills) of hard cold cash, but we're thankful that we had an emergency fund for cases like this.

There's Something About Millionaires

We've made more friends!! This particular friend of Shane's has a bachelors in economy and he sent us a cool version of a budget system he made up plus some millionaire facts. He and his wife haven't heard of Dave Ramsey but they are on the road to repaying debt.

A couple of lesser known facts I think you'll find interesting: (answers down below)

1-The type of car the average millionaire drives?

2-How much does the average millionaire make a year?

3-How do rich people get rich?

Answers:

1- a used car

2- $50,000/year (remember, being a millionaire means someone has $1 million dollars)

3- rich people pay themselves first, meaning they put money aside for their savings, retirement, Roth IRA's, etc, as soon as they get paid, instead of paying bills first then putting whatever little left into savings as most people do. Often times what is left is not much if anything at all, and people will spend that amount., never building wealth for their future. 

It's so Aweful to be the Flake

I feel absolutely terrible for letting some people down because I had made all kinds of plans for the month without realizing "hello!! You kind of have a budget to take into account"
First of all in the month of September we gave ourselves $150.00 for entertainment but only spent about $100.00. For October we lowered our fund to $100.00.
The local amusement park hosts a halloween fest just like Knotts Scary Farm in southern CA which is an anual tradition I love to do with friends. We decided to go to the fest for home-sick sake and we were so lucky to be friends with someone who works there who gave us a major discount on our tickets about $17.00 cheaper, plus she took work off to be able to go so those plans were set in stone totaling up to $92.00, leaving $8.00 leftover in the entertainment envelope.
Next on the list was a pumpkin party we had already planned for about 2 weeks in advance with our close friends the Dayrits.
At school I joined the Ballroom dance club and we're always encouraged to go to the Mambo Room a dance studio/club on Friday nights which is $10.00 per person. I began getting a group together and planning for us all to meet at my house and carpool together. But then I went home and calculated that our $100.00 dollars in our entertainment envelope was not going to cover our halloween fest tickets $92.00, our pumpkins for the party $5.00 and $10.00 cover charge for the Mambo Room multiplied by 2 is $20.00. Man! Why didn't we keep the same budget from last month $150.00?
In order to stay under our budget I had to cancel on the Mambo Room because it wasn't a pre-planned event and what made it worse was because I was the coordinator the one organizing the function. Oh well, i texted the 3 girls and said that I was really really sorry for being a flake and I told them the truth which was I didn't have enough money to afford it. Luckily 2 out of the 3 girls said they weren't going to make it anyway.
Shane was really happy I canceled because it had been a while since we stayed home on a Friday night and watched movies. Yup, we rented from redbox and used our coupon we recieved on account of being new Virginia residents to order a free medium pizza. Friday night = $2.12
Saturday night: $5.00

Sunday=$0.00
Invited friends from church over to play games
Total for the Entertainment Envelope:
$100.00
- 92.00 - halloween fest
- 5.00- pumpkins
- 2.12-redbox
__
$0.88 leftover

Our Second Budget meeting

For some reason our first budget meeting was quicker than the last. We started Saturday morning at 10:30am then I went to work and left Shane continuing the budget. When I got back at around 4:30 he was still there and we finished up the budget together at 5:30. It took us 7 hours, but now that we made up rules about our budget and figured out some confusing details, this will save us some time next month.
 In our picture we are at the business office of our apartment complex using its free wi-fi internet.

What also made our budget take forever was calculating how much money was leftover from the month of September which is the first month we started our envelope system and Dave Ramsey's Zero Balance budget. Don't let the "Zero" scare you. The "Zero" doesn't mean that the budget is like one of those diets where you just have to starve yourself till you're crippled. It doesn't mean that you don't have to buy milk because water is good enough. NO! The "Zero" means that at the end of the budget you know exactly where all your money is supposed to go. "Every dollar has a name." as Dave Ramsey suggests. The point is to have a spot for each dollar so they don't get lost in the "black hole of spending". (See the link at the end of the post to get the budget sheet).

I am pleased to report our left over amount was about $220.00 dollars. Our budget is organized in 3 columns over three pages, so while we were punching in the numbers into the calculator from the different pages it seemed to give us a different answer every time making us re-calculate over and over again. It was pretty frustrating because it was all on human error. But now we have an excel spreadsheet that we will begin using next month which will calculate the math for us. In the picture the book in front of me is our Dave Ramsey work book that has the budget worksheets we use to make our budget. The book between Shane and I is a calender book my sister-in-law Debbie gave me for free. We use that calender to keep track of the bills that come in. Every single bill we get in the mail we immediately record it in the book in red. On the correct date that it's due we write in the name of the company and how much is due.With a blue or black ink pen we write notes or our account numbers and passwords we have for each company like Sprint, Electricity, etc. As we pay our bills we use a highlighter to highlight the ones payed so that we keep track of what has been payed and what has not. This calendar book has also helped keep a record of how much our bills average out to so that we can keep track of anyone ripping us off and calculate our 3-6 month emergency savings. The orange box is a file book where we file all off our receipts by month.

Since we payed off our debt last month we now get to put the $300.00 dollars that were assigned to the debt columns in September toward our baby step #3 which is making a 3-6 month emergency fund in case we were to be out of work. But wait..... since we decided to take a trip to D.C. in April we re-directed some of the $300.00 dollars to save up money for that, and we also had to use some of that money for our other envelopes. In the end we are putting $200.00 dollars away for Baby Step 3.

Click here to get the Zero Balance Budget spreadsheet

We're too cheap to buy text books. Shane checks out his math book from the library and sneaks pictures of his homework assignments.

Fun Weekend = $0.00

This last weekend was wonderful. We've found that being involved in clubs and sports and making friends has given us things to do on weekends that cost less compared to our boring expensive weekends in the past.

Well this past Friday we went out to dinner with our friends at TGI Fridays then we had a fun game night playing Famous People (thank you Laura for teaching us that game). Shane and I scored on a free dinner at TGI Friday's because we had let our friend Jack use our car the past weekends and he wanted to pay for our dinner in return.
After dinner we played a couple of rounds of a game called Famous People at our friends' house. Famous People is a really fun charades type of game that Shane's sister in law Laura taught us. We had so much fun. We spent a total of $0.00 dollars last Friday.

Saturday we decided to buckle down and make our budget for the month of October. 
Saturday night the girls got together and gamed it up totaling $0.00 dollars again.
On Sunday we had an amazing conference. I got up early to prep for our dinner that evening because we were having the missionaries and our neighbors over. Then, since we don't have internet at our place, we watched the first session of conference at the church building. We went from there to have lunch with a family from church who'd invited us over for food and the last session of conference. We had a whole Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, mash potatoes, stuffing, rolls. Very delicious food and amazing company. There were two families, another couple our age with no kids, and us. We had so much fun chit chatting, making jokes, hanging out, it was really awesome getting to know our new friends. We watched the 2nd session of conference and we were off to our house to get ready for our dinner. When our guests came over we ate and played games afterward.
 Over all our weekend didn't cost very much. We played a lot of the same games and the environment was someone's home, but what made it so much fun is that we got to hang out with different groups of people  every time and had good conversations. I always think about the conversation in "Eat Pray Love" when some Italian is explaining to the main character Elizabeth how Americans pass time always looking or wanting entertainment. We as Americans can't sit still. Apparently the Italian lifestyle is to sit and do nothing, just talk, eat, and stay local. This has helped me to realize that if I'm not spending my weekends traveling, site seeing, going to shows, eating out at restaurants, doing something different to identify that it's a weekend, well, it's OK because I can relax and enjoy life with simple activities, good company, and of course my husband.