In our fourteen years of marriage we have never stuck to a budget. Reason? We weren’t convinced we had the money to budget. We needed the cash to pay the bills (electric, house, gas….you get it). And, I can hear you thinking…but that’s WHY you need a BUDGET. This post has a sponsored link to relevant and applicable business resources that you may find helpful.

Right?

While I agree we need a budget, that still doesn’t solve the “low cash flow” situation we are continually in – which is why my husband wants me to continue using a credit card vs.cash for the things I’m responsible to buy.

Since he’s the head of the home I need to respect his wishes.

Work and Home

I work from home as a blogger (freelancing, basically) and at times over the years have done childcare in my home and sold things on Ebay and at a local flea market. Before moving a couple years ago we lived near a stadium and sold parking at our house for extra money, too. My husband works overtime when he can and in the past has even worked two jobs. So there were a lot of separate streams of revenue, but with the right internet tax tools, it wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle.

Though I didn’t plan to in the beginning, I have been homeschooling our boys since our oldest was in first grade. He’s in seventh now. So, I can’t just go out and get a job. I’ve always worked from home or in our homeschool “coop” settings since having children.

Even when we were first married with both my husband and I working and no kids…we still did not make a lot of money and things were tight then.

Even with our Bachelor’s Degrees we have never had jobs that brought us a lot of money over the long haul. Incidentally, he and I both have a hindsight perspective on the “value” of college degrees that don’t amount to much after graduation. Just ask us sometime.

At any rate, I am the one in the family that does about 99% of the purchases related to what our family needs and uses so I am determined to budget (in whatever sense that word will come to mean in our situation) AS IF I am using cash.

Living Frugal

A few weeks ago I began a series sharing my frugal ways. Every Friday I do a Frugal Friday video on Youtube. Frugal living has been part of my lifestyle for years and now I just need to buckle down and work at sticking to a budget.

This Friday I plan to tell you about my grocery budget and how that’s going. If you’d like to get a notice when this video comes out you can subscribe to my Youtube channel here.

Is your situation like ours- where you just don’t feel you have the cash to pay all the bills and buy the groceries, too? How’s your budgeting going?

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