Another Reason to Love Mint.com

Mint.com is awesome, they now added a feature where you can "customize" your own budget categories. I have been wishing they allowed this feature since I joined up a year ago and because I was patient and stuck with this free and absolutely fantastic budgeting tool, my wish came true. So do me a favor and check out mint.com and let me know what you think of it!!

Hump Day

It sure has been a busy week and soon it will be the weekend! Over the past week or so, I have been attempting to create a zero-based budget, let me report it is a lot more difficult that it sounds. Having to assign every dollar to a financial category mean one really has to look at what bills actually are paid every month! You also realize how much STUFF you actually spend your money on. Also by doing this exercise, I have found subscriptions that I don't use anymore and can be canceled, this alone will save me 25.00 a month, and I have found a few more areas that can be eliminated. As difficult it was for me to gather all these bill, I find myself pretty happy with the budget. I will not implement the actual budget until May, but I have zero-budgeted for the month of April. I went ahead and gave myself fun money of $25.00 a week. That means if I want my nails done its out of that or if I want to go out and eat lunch with my fellow employees that will be taken out of my fun money. So far I have the basics: rent, savings for vacations, gifts and rainy day, utilities, child expenses (paycheck, college savings, clothes, etc) tithe, debt, groceries and even a few dollars for entertainment. I know in reality it will be hard the first few month to stick with this budget, but I think participating in my spending strike will help lay the foundation. I also found a good budgeting tool in Excel that works well for my needs, and it was free. Just click on today title and it it will take you to the budgeting tool :-D!


I am making an effort to only have one spending day a week, and that day was to be Saturday, however I am running out of my allergy medicine and Walgreen's is offering one day of free film development so I am heading there today. I will still make my normal grocery run on Saturday and groceries for me include food, paper goods and pet supplies. But I have already made a list of what is actually needed, and I am pretty good about not deviating from the list. So that is my mid week report, so far so good.