This is where I want to discuss budgeting. I think every woman should know where her money comes from and where it goes. We should all have a plan for how to make our money work for us. I’ll try to start us off with some of my own ideas, please jump in with your own too.
A bit of background about my own financial education:
From childhood, I’ve been one to stash away my cash from birthdays, Christmas, min-entrepreneur ventures, etc. Usually saving up for souvenirs on school or family trips, and especially for those Ray-ban styled purple sunglasses that made me look way-cool! I miss those shades…
Moving on, first jobs, first bank account, and first IRA (thank you Dad!). Then first college tuition bills (yes, mine), husband, first child, but no college degree – yet. This is when I worked up our first family budget. Newly married, newly mothered, and still in college.
Since my husband and I were studying to be engineers we decided that we would finance our tuition and living expenses with student loans predicting that our post-graduation income would justify the debt. This meant we were on a limited income even though we worked part-time too. Our priorities were keeping life as normal and healthy as possible for our son and getting our Bachelor’s degrees.
What I did was draw up a table listing all of our expenses by category and recording in each category how much was spent each week (sometimes each day). We had to put restrictions on our lifestyle in order to keep each category’s spending to a minimum. No cable T.V., no running the A/C, no using the dishwasher. You may be amazed at how much energy a dishwasher uses!
We eventually obtained those degrees and the full-time jobs, added baby number two, and kept a zero credit card balance…the student loans increased with the Master’s degree pursuit. But, we were able to purchase our first home while in graduate school and are working down those student loans.
This is probably long enough for an introduction. I’ll get into some specifics under separate posts.
