We are still alive: An update.

Wow.  Time flies!
This past year has been crazy busy.  It’s funny how we are on a quest for a simpler life, but to get there we are straining to keep up with life.  I got that little part time job last year and it has turned into a full-time, long hours, high responsibility position.  I feel like it is out of hand since I didn’t accomplish a lot of my personal ‘to do’ list last year.

We have had some minor fails, major fails, minor successes, and major successes over the past year, and from each we have learned a lot.

Minor Fails:
Not completing the canning I wanted to do
Getting behind on our financial plan
Couponing
Selling my car

Since I started working more hours at work, I had less time off to do the canning I wanted to do.  However, I did get several batches done.  I canned applesauce, plums, pickled fiddleheads, dilly beans, beets, nectarines, salsa, jam, bhut jolokia hot sauce, and mixed pepper hot sauce (only a couple litre jars of these since it takes a lot of peppers to make a jar).   The beans, beets, hot peppers, and ingredients in the salsa were grown in our garden.  The nectarines, plums, and apples are all from the farmer’s market, and we picked the fiddleheads in the forest in the spring. 

We had a couple setbacks where we had to spend some cash instead of applying it to debt.  Our bed sprung a spring and was injuring us if we forgot about it.   It was 12 years old – Time for a new one.  Little things like this happened all year long, but thank goodness we saved a little cuishon (over and over) because it made life so much easier than having to use credit.

I love couponing.  Love, love, love.  But between working, cleaning, and replacing things I haven’t had the time to coupon.  It makes me really sad.  I have, however, acquired enough stuff from couponing last year that most of the toiletries and cleaning products I got have lasted me until now, with more to spare.

As for my car, I listed it over and over on classified sites and had a couple bites but those people never showed up at the times they had scheduled.   By my calculations, as of May I shouldn’t be upside down in my loan anymore so I will give selling it a try again.

Major Fails:
Spending enough time together
Allocating enough time to the things that are important to us
Building our house
Keeping up with my blog

In past years, hubby and I spent a lot of time doing things together.  This includes camping, fishing, taking long drives, vacations, walks at the park, movie nights, and so on… While this whole experience was meant to bring us closer together, we have been working so hard to accomplish our goals that we have not taken as much time to be together as we had in the past.  This is a mistake.  We have purchased a daily devotional for couples to help ensure we spend more time with each other, even if it is for a given amount of time each day.

A major fail for us was not breaking ground on our house.  We were denied permits by the township because the location where we wanted to build the house is a green zone and protected for deer migration.  A house can still be built there on a different spot, there are just many, many restrictions – not my kinda deal.  We’re out.

And finally, the last major fail has been not keeping up with this blog.  I really enjoy writing, and this blog is a great way to document my journey.  I wish I had written about a lot of things over the past year that I didn’t have time to document.  I would love to have the opportunity to look back and reflect on the past year, hopefully this is something I can change going forward!

Minor Successes:
Our garden!
Some Canning
Learning new skills

We got a lot of fresh veggies from our garden this summer.  We had four small to mid-sized gardens this past summer.  In our smallest we grew radish, pumpkins, and watermelon.  In the next one we grew carrots and cucumbers.  Our second largest garden was for peppers: jalapeno, scotch bonnet, bhut jolokia, and chilis.  And our largest garden was a raised garden with kale, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, beans, squash, cauliflower, celery, beets, green pepper, onion, leeks, and cabbage.  The cauliflower and cabbage rotted but everything else turned out beautifully, especially the kale.  Hubby brought home some locker platforms that he was going to strip the wood from, but we decided to flip them over and use them as a frame for a garden.  It looks kind of crappy but it worked great! We also had a pallet garden in which we grew some herbs, and pots with mojito mint and parsley.

 

When I did have a free moment in the past months, I really enjoyed learning how to do new things.  I found a food dehydrator on clearance for $30 and it has been great fun learning how to preserve foods with it.  In the winter we made maple syrup!! This was a blast.  Tapped some trees, collected sap every day, then boiled it down.  We got several litres of maple syrup from it.  Some trees didn’t produce, but when we went back to them in the summer we realized that those ones were oak trees.  Rookie mistake.  lol.

Major Successes:

Paying off 3 debts!

We have managed to get rid of a lot of debt.  We are down to one card, a car, and a student loan.  Hopefully we can sell the car in the spring, that will leave us with, by that time, a student loan and a very small chunk of credit card debt.

 

We are excited for what the new year brings.  I have a lot to share and document of what I can remember of the past several months and while we are behind on moving on with our lives and into our forever home, I think the choices that we made as a result of our experience will be for the better.

Makin’ Progress on our Financial Plan!

I haven’t posted in a while because our computer kicked the bucket and we had to save up to buy a cheapie to get us by for now.  We depend on it for all our budgeting, banking, price matching, couponing, and research on our new home — so finding time to go out of our way to do these things without a computer has been challenging.

We are feeling so good about where our finances are heading!

We have completed our first baby step of saving $1,000 in an emergency fund and are currently working on Step 2: Pay off debt using the debt snowball.

Our first debt, a $750 credit card balance will be paid off on Tuesday.  It was the smallest of our debts but it feels good to get rid of it.  I called last night and closed the account so it truly is a goner and cannot sneak back into our lives.  Our second, a $1900 Visa, will be paid off in 4 more weeks!  During the first two months of budgeting we felt like we were going to be doing this forever since my job didn’t begin until mid-February.  Now that I have had a couple cheques come in we are feeling like there actually might be light at the end of the tunnel.

My little job has earned us an additional $3800 ($3200 after tax) since I started exactly 2 months ago… I am so, so grateful for the opportunity since it has really helped to push us along.

I am hoping that after I get my house re-organized in the next week or two I can take some time to get this blog caught up… So much has gone on over the past month or two – some good, some bad… but I can’t wait to share it all!

Things We Learned after our First Month of Budgeting

1. Money was slipping away in areas in which we never paid attention.  Bank fees, automatic withdrawals, subscriptions, and surprise bills all took from our cash, and from other areas of our budget.  They were things we never thought about before we started budgeting and just dealt with them when we saw they had been withdrawn from the account.

2. Pets need to eat and be healthy too.  We didn’t budget for the pets.  Their food costs us about $25 per month and their vet bills are about $200 per year.  We need to add at least $500/year into our budget for the pets so that they are accounted for and we do not rob other budget categories to care for them.

3. We are cheaters.  When we wanted something we couldn’t afford, we found a way to buy it.  For Christmas we received $100 gift card for fuel.  We wanted to make a large purchase and didn’t have the cash to do it, so we traded our gift cards for $100 of our fuel money.  Or if we wanted to buy something, we would return merchandise to the store for credit to buy the things we want.  I don’t know if either of these are cheating, but it certainly felt that way.

4. (Not to point fingers) He is more of a cheater.  He would use credit and debit cards to buy coffees and donuts then still withdraw his blow money for the week.  I didn’t want to say much because I didn’t want to feel like I was nagging him.

5.  Budgeting is stressful.  While we were getting into the habit of budgeting we blamed each other a lot.  We both tried to be mature about the situation but I was blamed a lot for “taking money away” and he was blamed a lot for “spending too much”.  We are now blaming less and trying to be more of a team but it was a but rocky at first.

6.  We won’t be successful on only one income.  We have too many financial obligations to go anywhere fast on one income.  It will get done eventually, but not as quickly as we would like it to.  Therefore, we need additional family income.

7.  Some months cost more.  January was a killer month for us, in a bad way.  It was the first New Year with only one income and, to make it that much better, it had an extra week of payments!  Our car loan and my student loan are paid on a bi-weekly basis.  This month we had six payments due between these loans compared to the usual four payments which made this month cost more.

8. Friends will be upset with you at first.   We have been invited many places and on a couple vacations and we have had to decline.  Normally we would have been on board with anything, and our friends knew this, so they were upset when we couldn’t afford to do much.  Even though we have explained to them that we are budgeting, they can’t seem to grasp the idea… yet.  Hopefully once we begin to make some progress, they will also be on board with budgeting themselves.

9.  You don’t realize how much you want until you can’t have it.  We need (want) a new laptop.  Can’t have it.  We want to go to Florida. Can’t have it.  We want to stay in a cottage up north for a weekend.  Can’t have it.  We want a lift on our truck.  Can’t have it.  We want a new rug for our house.  Can’t have it.  These are all wants, not needs, that we don’t budget for.  Normally these wants would have been made into purchases without a second thought.

10.  We didn’t budget enough for some things.  We found that we were going over our grocery budget for items like milk and eggs.  We spend a lot of money on our CSA shares and are hoping that we can cut that $120/month out of our budget as of the renewal in April.  We LOVE having local organic produce delivered each week, but since we grow a lot of our own veggies in the summer, we can do without the CSA for at least the spring and summer shares.   Our second month of budgeting will be a little smoother than the first since we can work out some of the problems that we ran into.