December & Plans for 2008

Happy 2008! This past year flew by! I don’t want to look at my spending in December. It was way over-budget. Of course most of that was on computer supplies for my husband’s home office- which can be written off as a business expense. The rest was for holiday gifts, medical expenses, and too many dinners out. The holiday gift cost wasn’t as high as previous years because we won a gift certificate to Amazon.com because my husband filled out a survey there…that really helped us out. We “got by” for most of the month, and then had to resort to credit cards to pay for groceries and gas for the last week, when we ran out of money. I’m not proud of how December went, but I plan to put away $500 for holiday savings next year.

2008 looks to be a much better year financially. My husband just started a new job where he’ll be making a much larger salary- a 36% increase in pay from his previous job! And, he will be working from home, saving us a lot of gas and car maintenance money. We don’t plan to change our spending habits because of this increase. We’ll try to stick to a budget…and it may be more attainable now, since we’ll be able to put money in savings in addition to paying off debt.

On December 31st, we paid all of the January bills we had, and were able to set aside money for the bills that haven’t arrived yet. We’re still sticking with the $1200 in other monthly expenses budget…which gave us a little left over (about $100) to put in savings. We haven’t made much progress on debt reduction, but I am determined to not go any higher than before. Our current non-mortgage debt is $30,000 as of January 1st. The plan is to chop away at that credit card/car loan/student loan debt all year long and just see how low we can get it.

My husband and I are also going to stop using credit cards. We’re going to see if we can make it through the month of January without credit cards, and I hope we can make it even longer than that. Once we fill up our emergency savings fund, it will be easier to avoid adding more debt to our charge accounts.

I have high hopes for debt reduction this year- with a larger income and daycare expenses disappearing in September when our child starts kindergarten, using less gas, and sticking to a budget, and NOT CHARGING...we should be able to make some wonderful progress.