Money Woes

Much of yesterday morning was spent worrying about money... again. This topic seems to come up a lot.

After getting up at 6, I had breakfast, and then got down to money stuff. I put in all of the receipts, printed out our category spending report, and then plugged everything into our budget. I discovered that, once again, we were over-budget, WAY over-budget for the month of August. I began to ask myself "why?," since it always feels like we are saving, but on paper, we are not.

Well, first off, I was expecting my stipend for writing the band show for the HS band I write for. I usually get it in August, but it didn't come yet. I'll have to e-mail the director, to find out what the deal is. The other thing was, and here's where the guilt comes in... my Zen. I was depending on that money to buy the Zen. Well, I bought it, and then the money never came in the month. So I went, "okay, let's pretend I did get the money--how would the budget work out then?" No better, we were still in the hole for the month. Just a little bit over here and there on a bunch of categories, but enough to break the budget for the month.

I took a deep breath, and said, "Okay, we just gotta be more careful in September." Then I remembered that I have been saying this a lot lately. Then, I actually took a look at how much we had saved this summer. It was a little bit, but nowhere near the amount of savings we need to live while Meg is home. And, it doesn't look like we are going to be able to save a whole lot more.

I felt like I had failed. I felt so optimistic about all of this working out months ago when I planned it. Then, I began to ask, "where did the money go?" And it was pretty easy to figure out. Our beautiful deck came with a price tag of $2,300. It never felt like that much, because we were buying things for it slowly, but when you add up all of those Home Depot receipts, that's the grand total. We overspent on groceries and food this summer, although we are already in the process of fixing that. I poured a lot of money into the pool. We poured money here and there into stuff for the house. It was very obvious what had happened. We made a budget, didn't follow it, and now we have to come up with plan B.

I broke this bad news to Meg, and after the initial shock, began to brainstorm. Meg thought of the idea of just going back a month early, but this probably isn't possible, since her sub has already been hired. We decided to put an ultimatum on spending. Only buy what is absolutely needed. Nothing more. If we're bored, we'll find something free to do. We also learned that we have a tax credit coming our way, just for having a kid this year. That will help. And if things get really bad, we can always dip into our summer pay savings, and repay that money with the stipends we earn at the end of next school year. That means sacrificing any home improvement projects for next summer, and the possible vacation with my family to OCNJ for the week.

We also resurrected the idea of starting our lesson studio. We tried it at the end of last school year, but only half-heartedly. I had one student, a kid of one of the people in the handbell choir. We kept up lessons for a while, but ours and their schedule were so busy, we had to keep canceling lessons. I think we might have actually had maybe 5 or 6 lessons or so.

But, we figured out, that if we can actually get some students and maintain them, that it could bring in some extra money... to use for the fun stuff that we wouldn't otherwise get to do. Here is our plan. A going rate for lessons is $15/half hour. We figured we would charge $50 for a month's-worth of lessons. That equals out to about $12.50 a lesson ($10 if the month has five lessons in it). $50 a month sounded like a lot to me (we could never afford that), but anyone who had the money for lessons should find the rate competitive. If we each get 1 student, that's and extra $100 a month. Enough for a few dinners out. If we each get 2 students, that's $200, and you can do the math for anymore. It sounds great, but I am not that optimistic that we will get even that many students. We live in a blue-collar community, and I don't see many people having an extra $50 a month. But, hopefully a few will. Meg made posters, and we are going to put them up everywhere we are allowed. Meg is also going to call the local band directors, and send a letter with some business cards. It would be nice if this works, to actually have money outside of our tightly budgeted income.

Feeling better about money stuff, we had lunch, and then I got to work on more school stuff. I got a bunch more done, but not enough to satisfy me. I decided today would be my last day to do school work this summer. Hurricane Ernesto is making its though the Delaware Valley, and therefore the weather is crappy. It's a good day to stay in and work on school stuff. The weather is supposed to be a little nicer on Sunday and Monday, so I will relax those days, before the school routine starts again on Tuesday (still not bummed yet for some reason... I hope it stays that way).

After the school work yesterday, Meg and I went to Peter's for dinner. The great thing about a diner is that you can eat a good meal for relatively cheap. And and Peter's, you really get your money's-worth. I had soup, a cheeseteak, fries, and a cannoli--Meg had fried chicken, a baked potato, salad, onion rings, and coleslaw. The total for all of this was $20. Our waitress was really good though, so I gave her a bigger tip than usual-- $6. I am a firm believer in the minimum of 20%, unless you have really crappy service (in which case, I leave the standard 15%). 20% is easy to figure out. Just move the decimal point over, and then double. Like this: let's say your bill came to $25.72. To figure out the tip you'd: (1) move the decimal point over: $2.57, and (2) multiply by 2: 5.14. Then I usually round up to the nearest dollar, so in this case, $6. It always pays to leave good tips at a restaurant you go to a lot, because, chances are, you'll have them again. And as a former waitress, Meg will tell you that this will make a difference.

After Peter's, we went to Wal-Mart, to do the first half of our new shopping system. We got out of Wal-Mart only having spent $50. Today, we are going to do the Sam's part of the shopping. This will be an expensive trip, but it will be a lot of stuff that will last us for a month or longer. We won't know until the end of the month whether this new shopping strategy will make a difference, but I sure hope it does.

After shopping, I was going to get more schoolwork done, but ended up watching 2 episodes of Star Trek: TNG, and surfing the web on my laptop. Ah, the summer has ended... let the procrastinating begin!!!