January Budget Review & February Goals

You can see my goals for January here. We met our savings and credit card payment goals, but unfortunately, I didn't do so well with paying the mortgages. I even wrote out some of the payments (we have rental houses), but forgot to send them out before the 15th! So annoying! I am still working on retraining my husband to not use the credit card. I didn't use any credit cards for the whole month, but he doesn't pre-plan things quite as well as I do. We have decided to remedy this by opening a separate checking account that we will put part of our cash budget into for him to use a debit card to access (I don't trust him with cash!).

I stayed within budget on my household and eating out budgets. I did go over the grocery budget, but just used extra money in the eating out budget to cover that. Now that my husband is on the Atkins diet, we are not eating out very much. I have $50 left overall that I will put in our savings account. Oh, and we did pay off the Christmas credit card charges.


February Goals

1. Pay ALL mortgages on time!
2. Pay $1000 to Citi credit card
3. Start working with accountant on 2008 taxes
4. Figure out where we will send Aspen to Kindergarten - we are deciding between a local public school or a private one, and if we decide on the private one, we need to start saving for tuition.
5. Plan mini-vacation (kid free) before new baby comes (hopefully we can find a way to do this without spending too much out of pocket. We will be checking our milage credit cards to see if we have any free tickets.)

I will be giving ourselves $250 for groceries, $200 for household (includes clothes) and $250 for eating out for the month in our cash envelopes. I am finding the Atkins diet to be much more expensive than our normal diet. We are just transferring some of our eating out budget to the grocery one to balance it all out. Our eating out budget is rather large (also includes babysitting $), but spending time alone together on a regular basis is something that is every important to us. The nice thing about using a budget is that you can save in other areas so that you can spend more in the ones that are more important to you :)