Saving in September: Turning Over a New Leaf

I'm so wasteful.

Then again, most American's tend to be rather wasteful. My problem with waste often seems to relate to buying food. My eyes have always been bigger than my stomach. However, I am wasteful in other area's as well.

I have for a long time been a Dave Ramsey fan. He simply teaches that you should live below your means, not accrue debt, and if you have it to pay it off as soon as you can.

Living that way, my wife and I are proud to say we haven't had a car payment in about 4 years. We paid off her student loans about 3 years ago. My student loans are a bit larger, however (gotta love going into debt to get a degree to work in a church) and we have not tackled them like we should.

In fact, when we first got married, we made a decent salary, and bought a whole lot of crap. We went out to eat a lot, we bought a lot of clothes, toys, etc that we didn't need. We probably could have paid off my student loans with all the playing we did with the money we made.

So we refer to that as our "stupid tax", and are trying to remedy that now. Our goal is to try to pay off my student loans by the time the new year rolls around, but realistically it will probably be around March of next year. That means we will be living below our means, living on less than we make, and throwing a big chunk of our income towards that debt.

So here's a few things we're going to stick with in September:
1. A budget. We've had a budget for 6 years now, but we've never really stuck with it, rather, we've used it as a guideline.

2. Cash. We don't have credit cards. We never have, and hopefully we never will. I don't have a problem with other people having credit cards, I just know that we would probably buy a lot more with them if we had them. We do use our Debit cards a lot, and I've realized we spend a lot more when we do. We don't even think about it, we just get stuff and pay for it with a piece of plastic. We are going to use the envelope system, and we're going to make it work.

3. Eating out is reserved for Sundays, and maybe Wednesdays. Sundays are hard for us to make it back to the house, plus, we enjoy hanging out with our new friends. I have had a bad habit of going out to eat for lunch A LOT. Its just so easy, but it also kills the wallet and the waist line.

4. Water. When we do go out, Kristen is real good about getting water. I, however, always tend to get a drink of some sort. A soft drink at most restaurants costs between $1.50 and 2.50, and I never look to see how much it costs, I just get one.

5. Brown bagging the lunch thing.

I know that this will be hard, because we've been somewhat wasteful when it comes to our money. After I sat down and crunched some numbers, I was floored as to how much money we spent eating out, and wasting money on things we don't need. The goal is to pay off the loan, redo our kitchen, and then start paying off the house.

Things will get in the way, and Murphy will move in for a while, but we're going to do our best to act our "wage".