i am in charge of paying our bills, which is something i really enjoy. sometimes i think i have more fun getting all the bills paid on time than i do going on a shopping spree. whatever! i used to be a big spender, but then i took a position as an unpaid intern while i got my cosmetology license, things were tight, and now i can't seem to shop without buyers remorse... i consider this a good thing.
greg and i haven't really been feeling the effects of the crappy economy, but we have a baby on the way and i will be out of work for at least a little while... hopefully a long while! so it's time for me to get down to business, get organized, and make this work. last night i took 2 big steps in "home management" thanks to some inspiration from
simplemom. (check it out, one of my fav blogs)
1. i created a really simple yet awesome budget via
pearbudget.com. i always keep a mental budget, but it feels really good to take it more seriously. and even better, it's going to be really interesting to be able to see exactly where our money REALLY goes... and it makes it more difficult to spend on stupid stuff that you know you shouldn't be buying (like starbucks way too often...) definitely check out
pearbudget! you can try it for free for 30 days, and then if you want to keep using it (you will) it's only $3 / month.
2. i planned our dinner menu for the next two weeks. one of our biggest weaknesses is going out to eat way too much, so this is really going to help.
simplemom uses google calendar, but i prefer to use my ical since it's where i keep all my other calendar info. so i plan out what i want to cook for dinner each night, and in the "notes" section of each night's meal, i put the ingredients needed for any unfamiliar dishes. i use this to make my weekly grocery list.
also, if the
recipe is online, i put a link to it in the "url" section. to make this easier, i created a
delicious bookmark account. it's really handy for bookmarking your favorite online recipes, because you can add tags to each page you bookmark. for example, if you know you want to make something with chicken on wednesday night, you can click on the "chicken" tag and see all of the recipes you've tagged with that word. wayyyy easy.
so this afternoon after work, i took used my ical planned menu for this week, wrote down the ingredients i needed to pick up from the grocery store, and was very pleased when i was EXACTLY on target for our "groceries" budget. hooray!! i love planning <3