January Half Month pulse check: Getting my bearings back

After two months of extraordinary expenses and whirlwind activity ( buying gifts, packing, travel, sight-seeing, jet-lag) we are trying to settle back into routine life. Last weekend was a weekend at home after a long time and I did appreciate the time to catch my breath.
We celebrated the down-time by watching back to back bollywood flicks ( me), repairing the laptop (BEB) and having some heart-to-heart talks about our financial goals in 2009 ( more on that later).
Now on to our financial status for the first half of January: Things are again falling into place after a long time, so far our balancesheet shows all the regular amounts and some of the extra expenses from our trip to Europe, but since there weren't many big expenses during the trip, so far it looks good.
One small change has been in the newspaper bill, which they keep on increasing every 6 months, but I couldn't take it anymore. So I had called the Customer Service and showed my disapproval of their policy and canceled my subscription. I'll probably buy only Sunday newspaper to get coupons from now on.
All the other expenses look fairly balanced, but we got a big shocker in the form of our IT dues. We made a mistake in calculating our dues for the year, and now we have to cough up something to the tune of 10K before March. That would mean no savings for two more months. Oh! How I hate it when we have to live on zero savings, and this is going to be the fourth consecutive month, bravo!
On the brighter side, had we known about this we would have reconsidered our trip to Europe and that would mean missing out on so many beautiful experiences and memories. Good that we came to know about our goof up only when we came back. I hope to still squeeze in some small savings by cutting corners here and there. I'll keep you posted.

December Half Month Pulse Check: All set to break the bank

Photo courtsey: Mysza831


The bad news - We're spending a lot this month. In fact, at the time of writing this post, we have already spent the equivalent of our monthly budget.
The good news - The expenses were expected, planned for and didn't slow us down on our saving goals.

So yes, December has been an expensive month around here. The biggest expenses had been the gifts for friends and family and some of the preparations for the trip we're going to take during the Christmas break. It also helped that we had been planning this trip since September, so some of the costs were spread over the earlier months. It also helped us find the best deals for the gifts that our family members had asked for. Now that we have purchased the gifts and some other stuff for ourselves that we'll need while traveling, I hope that second half is not as expensive.

Other than the gifts, rest of the expenses have been fairly routine. In fact, in rest of the categories we actually spent lesser than usual.

November Budget Report : Fallen off the bloggerwagon edition

This was one of those incidents where you just can't get around to doing what you would very much like to. I was under the weather for most of the thanksgiving weekend and so many things got piled up that I couldn't get to blogging even after getting better. Finally I got rid of this writer's block/over-activity and came up to share my budgeting results for the month of November.

Surprisingly, this month has been really good for budgeting. Despite spending money on several extra ( both needful and discretionary) items, we still managed to stay under our targeted budget and with the way things are going for last 3 months we have also decided to lower our targeted budget and to try to get there in 2009.

In November we also managed to hit two of our long term goals. Here are the highlights of the month which I can't wait to share with you.

1) Hit our target of saving 10% of down-payment for our home. Yaay!!!
Over to saving 20% now to avoid that no-good PMI.
2) Hit my targeted weight for the first time in 6 months. Although I couldn't stay there for long, I'm hoping that its a positive step towards attaining it in the long run.
3) Sewed two dresses for my niece and a reusable bag. It has been a long time since I last sewed anything and my last project was a disaster. This time I remained very careful with measurements etc and made sure that I go exactly by the book. I'm so looking forward to trying them on the baby. We will be meeting her on the Christmas.

As for the spending categories this month, we saved a lot in gas, thanks to gas prices. We also managed to stay well under budget in Groceries and Dining out, Personal grooming and auto maintenance. The only category where we went well above budget was the expenses on family. Although it showed up as an extra expense on our worksheet, we had actually known this expense and had accounted for it while planning the expenses for this month.

So in all, a good month for budget and the great thing is that it has made us keep high hopes for the coming year.

Novemeber Half Month Pulse Check: So far so good

I'd been expecting some big expenses this November. We had to get our car serviced and its AC repaired. We had to make some big ticket purchases ( for our home as well as gifts). Since we held off making those purchases until Black Friday and BEB didn't get a chance to research a good mechanic for our car, we haven't incurred any extra expenses yet. But I know that they are on the horizon and we'll be getting those things immediately after Thanksgiving. So November has been ok so far but I am estimating that it will turn out to be expensive than other months finally. We'll see.
Other than finances, there are a couple of changes that I have made this month, which I'm hoping will bring some zest into our life.

• Instead of gunning for exercising everyday, now I try to exercise 6 days a week. The rest day can be any one of the days when I'm really hassled or we have something extra to do, or when I just don't feel up to it. After doing it for 2 weeks now, I find that it is much better for my sanity and now that I've officially included in the plan, I don't feel guilty about it. Really, everyday is too big a commitment.
• I'm also trying to actively increase my stamina while exercising, this would help me to burn the same amount of calories in 6 days as I used to do in 7 days.
• To bring back a little fun in the food, I have decided to allow myself to go a little liberal with oil and butter. Not that I'll be serving fries everyday, but once a week we can have something with a little butter on it or the vegetables that I cook can be seasoned in a little more oil to cook them well. I found that it greatly enhanced the taste of food and both of us look forward to our meals again. It had become too drab earlier, when we had tried to drastically cut-back on oil and spices.
• In the same vein, I have decided to let go of our regular food of chapati and vegetables on weekend and replace it with some fun food. Mostly it is whatever we feel like eating, although I consciously try to control the amount of fats that go into that. I am also actively looking for long forgotten recipes, or easy to try dishes to add more variety to weekend meals.

Really, a few simple changes can make life so much better. Here's to the healthful as well as tasty November.

October Half Month Pulse Check: No news = Good news edition

October has been uneventful month so far. We have had all the usual expenses and then some for my gym clothes. This time we also spent all our entertainment money on a movie at the theater. This month also included more than usual trips to restaurants but since they were relatively inexpensive and I had some coupons we didn't spend a lot. I am about to concede that we consume ( and keep consuming) more gas than I thought we would. Our gas expense is all set to hit a new high this month as well. I'll try one more month before setting up a higher limit for it.

Thanks to Walgreens our toiletries and other household expenses have been kept in check. So if nothing untoward happens we should be hitting our targeted budget this month.

September budget report: It wasn't that bad really

So I'm back with my results for September. This month was a month of some extra expenses which I should have planned beforehand, but didn't, and that resulted in our going above budget. Also we decided that we wanted to spend some money on our fitness and paid a substantial amount upfront, which was also unaccounted for so that led us to go over-budget this month.

So our major budget breakers this month were: Personal grooming ( this included gym membership fees) and gifts for friends and family. Besides these, we relapsed into our habit of coming home from our offices for lunch+tea and that combined with some picnics, so we paid almost 2X for gas this month. Apart from this we did really well in all other categories.

After all is said and done we ended up going 64.13$ above our targeted budget. I also expect to get $57 back in mail in rebates, so it is actually $7 deficit. So I think it is not so bad after all and I just need to be more careful about irregular expenses next time.

So that was the lowlight for the month, and now about the highlights:

1) I am pretty excited about the new fitness regimen that we have been following. Recently BEB and I completed 50 days of uninterrupted daily exercise. Now that's a first and I hope we'll have many more such milestones.

2) My efforts to generate alternate income have been gathering momentum, slowly but surely. I have gotten really good at handling coupons, snagging deals. I have had many freebies and gift cards coming through various survey and test-drive opportunities. BEB was initially ho-hum about the whole idea but now he has become open towards it. This blog has also seen some progress in terms of new opportunities, although I haven't been able to devote the kind of time I would have liked.

3) I've also become much better at taking care of my appearance. I have been updating my nail-polish frequently, paying more attention to my clothes and trying to look better in general. And you know what, it shows...I got many complements from my colleagues about my clothes :)

4) I've paid more attention to the upkeep of our home as well. Now I try to clean it more frequently so that I have to spend less time on the weekends in cleaning. I think this is working out well but we'll see...

5) We have made great progress towards saving for the down payment of our house, but we still have a long way to go before we reach that "No PMI" mark, i.e. 20%.

By the way, I celebrated my birthday in September. In a way it felt like all those freebies, new opportunities and rewards were some sort of birthday gift for me because I have been working on them for such a long time with little returns and suddenly this month it all started falling into place. I just hope this wave of good events continues and with that, I look forward to October.

Looking back: Did I really use money wisely or was it just my imagination

I had been reading Trent's blog The Simple Dollar, when the idea of doing this exercise struck me. Over the last year I have grown to be much more careful with my money and wary of wasteful expenses...or so I think. I am going to put this notion to test. I'm going to look at all the things that I bought this year, that are over 50$. And see if I have just bought things that are useful, or I have also collected some junk. I can already see that it is going to be fun. It will be easy to do this exercise because I usually jot down all my expenses, with a short note on what item that money was spent on. If I have time, I'll also try to evaluate the expenditures between $25 and $50, but for now, I'm sticking with $50 limit. Let's see...this is going to be interesting.

January expenses over 50$

Breakfast bar - being used almost daily
my shoes - used almost daily - now worn out
BEB's hoody - impulse buy - but used quite a few times

February

BEB's jacket - Used it a lot last winter, took it to Lake Tahoe trip
My training pants - Currently using them a lot in gym
BEB's Jeans - Has been wearing them day in and day out

March

My bag - BEB bought it as a gift for me, the most expensive bag I've ever had. I had used it a lot during India trip.

April

Patio set - Have not used it as much as I would have liked and summer is almost over.

Sewing machine - Not used it a lot, although I sew a skirt and a bag and repaired a couple of clothes. So its not a total waste but could have been used better.

May

My clothes - I consider it money well spent. I have never felt the dearth of clothes after that shopping. And I love the clothes I bought then, am wearing them everyday to work.

June

Food Processor - This was a long pending item, but we still bought it on impulse. Although we use it daily. I still feel that we overpaid on this item. Lesson learned - never go to a store when you're to exhausted to compare and check.

GPS - the verdict is still out on this one. We do use it when we travel out of the city and on those rare ocassions its a life-saver.

Bed - It was a delayed purchase that we should have made an year ago. But I couldn't be happier when we finally bought it. Its good.

July

Sofa - This may get the award of best purchase of the year. We bought a very lightly used one and the price at which we'd snagged never fails to amaze people. We spend most of our time at home on it and we just love it.

Biking gear - We used it for a month but then we started going to the gym, instead of biking and now it is not being used that much.

August

My clothes - These were solely want based purchases, but I have been wanting to buy these kind of clothes for almost 6 months, and now that I have them, I just love wearing them. Pls I got them at a super low price from the clearance racks. I can't classify these as bad purchase.

September

Gym membership - so far so good. We have been going almost daily.
Bathroom accessories - This is also one of those "nice to have" purchases. We didn't really need them, but then I got tired of our dull looking bathroom, so we just went ahead and got them.


The verdict - Except for the patio set, there isn't much that I can classify as bad investment. So I can pat my back on this one and can reassure myself that I have gotten better with money.

September half month pulse check: Sweat it out edition

Hmmm...we have been doing ok, but not as good as I would like to see us do. We made use of all the wiggle room we had already. A Gym membership, some gym accessories and bathroom makeover later I see that there's no way we are going to hit our targeted budget in September.

The good news however is that we have been making full use of our gym memberships, this is our fourth week in the gym and both of us are really happy with our decision to get a membership. We have been going there everyday ( touchwood! ) and now that we have become fairly comfortable with their cardio equipments, we have been trying some weight training as well. So yes! Its one extra expense but this is something I would like to keep despite the expense.

Coming back to the expense report, we have already spent about 70 percent of the month's budget and we still have half a month to go. The biggest mistake we made was being a little lax in the beginning of the month. We didn't observe "No expense days", ate out twice and spent on purchases that could have been postponed, and before we knew the 'total' went through the roof.

So now we have to be more careful with our purchases for the rest of the month and try to get away within our targeted budget - its not going to be easy.

By the way, the bathroom looks really good and inviting after adding new curtain, and matching bath set. I might just ignore the budget mismatch for once.

August budget report: YAAY!!!

We passed the August budget test with flying colors. *Screams loudly* YAAAY!!!

Yep! We finally made it to the end of the month significantly under our targeted budget, and there were very few categories where we actually surpassed our allocated budget and quite a few, where we were below it substantially. After adding all the expenses, we're still $200 under our targeted monthly budget. Now thats what I call a phenomenal success.

So now it seems possible that we can live on less than the targeted budget and I don't need to bump it up to meet it. That sounds like good news to my ears.

Highlights of the month:

1) A few calls saved us almost 400$ yearly. I still can't believe we were paying so much for the insurance.

2) I finally started seeing some substantial money from my online money making efforts. This month I got about 50$ through various survey sites, I had been working on. It may be an exceptional month, or it could be such that these efforts have really gained momentum now. We shall see.

3) We have finally decided to take renter's insurance and a gym membership. In fact, we have already taken renter's insurance and we're trying a gym right now for a week where we want to enroll if it works out well. I am just amazed at how much effort it takes to cut down expenses and how easily the new expenses add themselves into our life. Well, this was a bullet I had to bite, I'll write another post about why I found it necessary to take a gym membership.

4) We looked into buying a house once again, we came across some decent homes, but so far it looks like they are not really within our budget. I think the right time hasn't come yet. We'll have to wait for a while, it seems. The good thing is that we're very close to 10% down payment for our housing budget. I would like to bring it to 20%, but it is not going to happen for a couple more months.

5) We again lapsed into the habit of coming home from office during the break. Our gas expenses took a serious hit because of that. We need to drop that habit.

6) I have also written into many carnivals and even organized make it from scratch carnival here at Learning the ropes. This blog has really become a big part of my life now.

Goals for the coming month:

1) Reduce waste: I feel that we could reduce our grocery bill significantly if I can reach that sweet spot where my refrigerator is properly stocked with the staples, but nothing gets wasted.
I've worked towards that in August but have more to do in coming months.

2) Find a way to maintain the leather furniture we have. We have off white Italian leather sofa, but I don't know what cleaners to use that can clean it without harming its texture.

3) Need to simplify my life a bit. I am now feeling that I have a lot more going on that I can comfortably handle. One big thing towards that is to plan a menu that I can get going easily during those crazy weekdays. Sometimes just getting the food on the table becomes such a big hassle.

So with a pat on our back, we look forward to September.

August half month pulse check: The Independence Day Edition

Today's 15th August, In 1947, on this day a country was born after being a colony under Britain for nearly two centuries. It still has a long way to go, but the journey has begun and it seems to be taking steps in the right direction. Happy Independence day India. Happy Independence day fellow countrymen.

Back to the business at hand, finally some relief from the ever burgeoning expenses. Thanks to "No expense days" we seem to be all set to meet our targeted budget for the month. Although we have already spent two-third of our monthly budget already, I'm not too worried because majority of it went towards monthly bills which we don't have to pay next fortnight.

However, there are still a few things that I'll be working on in the rest of August and September:

-Reduce the amount of food that gets wasted.
-Declutter home. We did this when we moved in to this place in March, but it looks like we again gathered some unwanted stuff.
-Lose weight. Its been a work in progress since the beginning of this year. My India trip did much damage and I'm still recovering from it 3 months later. Can you imagine what 3 weeks of no exercise can do to your weight. I've been exercising throughout the year, but its only now that I have found a right balance of exercise that works for my body and my schedule. Lets see if it shows up in my waistline.

July Budget: "No expense day" edition

So we are onto August now and I'm desperately hoping that the marching forces of expenditure take a break for a couple of months and let us touch our targeted budget for the month. But before that happens I have to go through the painful process of slicing and dicing our expenditure for July and from whatever I know of it, it ain't gonna be pleasant.

We finished 157$ below our realistic budget and 527$ above (???) our targeted budget. We had about 1400$ worth of unexpected expenses this month. So I can blame them for this spike in our expenses. What I want to see in the coming months is, "whether there's really some such thing as 'unexpected expenses' or whether I should allocate a big chunk to unforeseen expenses. We'll see.

Anyway, right now I feel that I have got the magical key to bring our spending down. As I have mentioned earlier we have decided to observe at least 3 "no expense days" where we try to spend no money at all on that day. It was BEB's idea which I adopted in no time. It was surprising to see how many "needs" just disappear, when we just wait them out for a couple of days. Specially doing it on weekdays was so easy and it saved time too. Earlier we used to stop at the grocery shop on the way almost every other day, now I try to get all the groceries on the weekend and avoid going to store during the week. I found that it saves a lot of time, and that one ingredient wasn't all that necessary after all. Biggest advantage was that BEB didn't get a chance to fall for that unhealthy snack every other day. Earlier when we used to go to grocery store every other day, then more often than not we ended up getting those fried Indian snacks, just because BEB got the opportunity to buy it. Later on, he felt guilty about eating those unhealthy snacks. Now, by avoiding going to the store we have reduced the chance of getting it.

If you really want to cut down your spending, just try it once, try not to spend any money, and I mean ANY money that day. You will really see how much difference it makes to your bottom-line.

We're back in the game!!!

About 2 weeks ago it seemed practically impossible to meet any of our budgets and I even toyed with the idea of tweaking our budget for more allocation in various budget breaking categories. But we practiced some self-restraint for a while. We started observing no-expense day where we'll have zero cash-outflow.And now it looks that we will be able to meet our realistic budget at least. We still have 5 more days to go in this month but I think unless some emergency comes we should be able to contain our spending within our realistic budget. Although I would love to remain within our targeted budget and can't wait to be in August to start it all over again.

No Expense Days

To make up for blowing our budget in first half of the month. Me and BEB decided to put some restraining order on our spending. So we observed no spending days on 16th and 17th. And know what? We did it. We didn't spend anything on the whole of Tuesday and Wednesday. If we keep at it, like this, we just might able to go in black this month. despite the expenditure we'd incurred already.

July: Half month pulse check (Not looking good edition)

July: Half month pulse check (Not looking good edition)
Ok so, we are halfway through July and the first half of July is not looking good as far as budget is concerned. We have already spent all the money allocated for the month in our targeted budget, and I would be happy if we match our realistic budget. My concern is not that we exceeded our budget, because whatever we spent on, we paid in full already, we are not in debt of any kind.My concern stems from the fact that this is the second month we will not be meeting our budget and if that continues to happen we'll have to revise our budget which would mean that we wont be able to meet our savings targets. That is something I won't like to see happening.
Biggest budget breakers:
Furniture - We bought most of our furniture between last week of June and first week of July. That had put an additional 1200$ on each month's balancesheet. These were the things that we had been putting off buying for almost an year. These expenses would have happened within this year anyway. It is just that I rather budget and save for them but I happened to find a couch and tables set that was too cute and inexpensive to pass up. ( sigh!)
Automobile - Some unexpected expenses on our car, again both in June and July. Hope we won't have to allocate this money every month. Ahh! the joys of owning a car.

Personal grooming - I have just finished my budget for the month in a single spa session. This was for something that was very important for me and although I didn't feel good while forking out the money, but I know that I didn't have many options here. The good thing is that it is still within the budget.

So, we are all set to do miserably for the month of July as well.The good thing is that BEB is on board to try our best for the rest of the month and keep spending in check wherever possible. We'll see.

My first month with budgeting...And the budget goes out of the window :(

I can't believe that half of 2008 is already gone. So June bids adieu and with it my first attempt at budgeting flops badly.
As I had mentioned earlier we had two sets of budgets: realistic and targeted, during the first half everything went fine, it seemed that we'll just remain pretty close to targeted budget if not meet it. And then came those big ticket purchases, the food processor, navigator the bed and a couple of other items ( not to mention the spillover expenses of India trip). And the expenditure left not only the targeted but also the realistic budget far behind, the final blow came yesterday when suddenly there was a promotion at a newly opened Indian grocery store. The prices were really good so we stocked up on many of our essential groceries.
This has been our most expensive month in the US. It almost looks ironical because this is the first month when we try to live with a concrete budget and also made positive changes in our expenditures to meet our targeted budget.
The silver lining in the cloud was that we got back some of our outstanding money, so our bank balances don't look quite as bad. I'm just hoping that this is an exceptional month and other months will be better. I'm not going to adjust our budget yet because I think it is fair and am hoping that our expenses will closely match it in the next months...we'll see...
But as expensive as June has proved, it was also the month of positive changes in personal finance. Some highlights:

• Made budget(s) ( *tries to pat her own back *)
• Opened a high yield savings account and started an emergency fund in it (brownie points)
• Got enough money from surveys to lend it on Kiva - First borrower - A couple from Indonesia ( I'm lovin' it). Collected about half for next lending.
• Opened an account to try my hand at P2P landing. We'll see whether it was a positive change.
• Trimmed the fat from our telephone bills. Got the family back in India on board on Skype. Everybody is happy.
• Cut back on eating out, entertainment expenses.
• Pared down our gas usage
• Cut down on our laundry expenses. (awesome!!!)
• Started stitching again ( my current project is a skirt )
  

The ones below are not strictly finance but a healthy mind and body would definitely have a positive impact on finances, or so I believe:

• Tried jogging instead of biking, accomplished my goal for the month.
• Lost holiday fat (hmmph...boy! am I glad)
• Tried to get (slightly) better at maintaining my beauty regimen
• Trimmed down the intake of caffeine.

Even I am amazed at what we achieved this month. Even with all the expenses I think June was a really good month. However, a big credit goes to BEB for trying hard to save even when I was thinking that we should be writing the money off in certain cases. So I'm glad that we made all those changes and I'm also glad that I took the time to write them down so that I can see the half full part of the glass.

So I say, bring on the July, we have worked hard here in June, and hopefully we'll reap the benefits for it in the months to come. Some things that I want to be done in July:

• Ask baby brother to complete the paper work in India
• Ask sister-in-law to apply for her passport.(Power of persuasion...:D)
• Pay attention to oral care. I'm not quite happy with the way I'm taking care of my teeth right now. I need to make sure that I take good care of them so that they last me a great many years.

I'm sure there will be many more things to do this July but I'm just happy that I'm here...

PS: By the way, we could recover some of our money from that impulsive food processor purchase. Last saturday we got back our 35$ after a price match from Sears.

June - Half month pulse check

Its past the half month mark for June and I dread doing the pulse check. June had been the month of unexpected expenses while we were still recovering from the splurge of India trip. Some of the expenses were voluntary, food processor anyone? some necessary but tripped us badly over the projected budget.
The major budget spoilers were - My shopping in India, this time I got some really nice formal shirts and trousers while I was in Bangalore. Since I have a really hard time getting my clothes in US, I thought it was ok to splurge on this one. I'm poorer by about $250 but I am all set for this year.
Grocery was another major budget breaker, though I didn't spend too much in buying real groceries but our two trips for cherry picking did show up badly on the budget, we bought and ate huge amount of cherries this year. I just want to cut myself some slack on this one. After all, we are not going to get any cherries after July, so better make most of the time we have.
Household goods - One food processor and the budget goes out of the window. As much as I love this gadget, I really regret impulse buying it.
Silver Lining in the cloud
Well, not everything went this bad after all, we tried and reduced out insurance bills, telecommunication bills. We haven't spent anything on eating out so far, and I'm hoping that we'll spend less than the allocated amount this month. We also tried t minimize our laundry expenses by rediscovering line drying. Lets hope that we will finish the month quite close to our targeted budget, if not matching it.

Power of writing it down

I had always thought that making a budget was not a required activity for us, rather it was one of those "nice to have" things. I'm saying this because both me and hubby are very careful with our money. We spend money after careful consideration, we keep track of almost every dollar we spend by writing it into a worksheet, and at the end of the month we get a nice graph of what our monthly expenditure is looking like. So I thought making a budget was just like doing the opposite, making that graph at the start of the month rather than at the end. Last month we realized our big financial goal. Since we were saving everything towards it till now, accomplishing it left a huge gap in our savings plan. So this month we thought it would be a great idea to think about our next financial goals and how much we'll be setting aside for them each month. This required having an estimate of how we were going to spend in the coming months and that automatically led us to making a budget. Boy! Both of us were in for a big surprise.
When we came to the final figure of our monthly spending, we were really disappointed to see that it was a bit above 1 person's monthly income. BEB reacted to this by saying that there was something wrong with the budget and that we had allocated too much in the categories that don't need that much spending. My response was "Show me how!" So we prepared another budget with tighter bounds in many categories, since both of us thought that we could live with that kind of budget, we decided to keep both versions of the budget for a while. We named the second version "target budget." But this is not where it ended, when BEB saw how much we have been spending on categories like Phone, Insurance etc, he decided that he could do something about it. First of all he canceled a subscription of calling cards to India which was charging us 10$ per month just in the subscription fees. Then he helped setup skype both at my home and his home in India so that most of our communication costs to India come down. Next he took care of the auto insurance, that one is down by 30$ a month. He's also watching all the other expenses carefully for the fat that can be trimmed down.
Now, we knew that we are paying that stupid subscription fees for the India calls. We also knew that we could haggle our way to lesser insurance fees. We just never bothered enough to actually sit down and do something about them. Thats the power of budget, it shows you those low hanging fruits which can be picked with just a phone call. Whats more, hubby is super excited about all these changes we have made. After all $80 every month is something, right?