Money Order request
Jelenedra:
J.M. Pescado: The Gothic Scrooge McDuck.
HomeschooledByTards:
Quote from: Zazazu on 2008 October 07, 18:16:22
My parents have four accounts in between them. Shared checking/saving, and personal checking x2. It works. They each put a percentage of their pay into the shared checking account which is used to pay all bills, put in shared investments, and for groceries. Anything at the end of the month over their cushion goes into savings. Then they have their individual checking money to play with. They each have their own cars (suburbs of a barely-city) so gas share isn't an issue.
That's a lot like what we do. We have five accounts, four checking and one savings. We put both paychecks into our main account, we each have an account for our fun money, and an account for "entertainment". Fun money, savings and entertainment funds are transferred automatically. We each have a debit card for our fun money accounts, and my husband has one for entertainment (I haven't had time to go by the bank and request one for myself). Daily expenses such as groceries and gas go on our credit cards, the idea is to pay off the credit cards at the end of each month.
We're paying off one of our cards every month, and making slow but sure inroads on the other lines of credit we have. Someday we will be debt free, and will pay off our cards every month. We both lost our jobs just before (Mr. Jesslla) and just after (me) we got married. I couldn't find a job for over a year, and then I went back to school for three years so we've racked up QUITE a bit of credit card debt during our marriage.
We both work ~35 miles away from home, but our schedules vary by quite a bit so we both have our own cars.
J. M. Pescado:
See, that is the picture of total financial irresponsibility. How I budget things is simple: First, I get a cost estimate for it. Then, I get a cost estimate on the contingency plan for when that doesn't work. Then, I get a cost estimate on the contingency plan for the contingency plan. Then, I get a cost estimate on the contingency plan for the contingency plan. Once I am satisfied that the chance that I will run out of contingency plans has become astronomically unlikely, I sum up the total cost estimates of everything involved, then double it. These funds are then set aside for the plan. Any surplus funds left over after execution to into the vault. As previously mentioned, this money is never seen by light of day again.
Jelenedra:
We have exactly three lines of credit. Our credit card, our car, and the Unsecured loan we got to pay off our credit cards.
Credit card has $300 left on it and the Unsecured loan has about $600 left on it. I expect that we will have that paid off by next month. After that, the monthly payment for that will go into a savings for our house. We don't have much of a nest egg right now because we've been shoving all of our free money into the unsecured loan. So we'll go from about $300/500 to $550/750 a month that is not ear marked for bills.
J. M. Pescado:
Have you considered that rather than waiting, you should simply suspend all spending and pay off everything now? And after that's done, since you'll be used to operating under the condition of having spendings suspended, just leave it that way. Once I slash an expense, it tends to stay slashed even after the budget crisis that prompted the slashing has passed, because by the time that's over, I'm just used to it that way and start to wonder why I ever bothered wasting money on that. And hey, more precious, shiny gold to roll around in!
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