Admit it, one of the first things you thought when you saw the positive on the pregnancy test was "Holy crap, kids are expensive. How are we going to do this"?
If this isn't you then you are a liar. It is one of the things I have been worried sick about. Not only having enough money to feed and diaper the child, but for things like childcare (holy crap), ballet classes in a few years (double holy crap) and even COLLEGE (AHHHH!!).
We've tried to take a head on approach to our cash flow. Yo, we're 24 years old, neither one of us are college graduates. We made a decent amount of money last year and we're on the road to make a bit more this year, but the way we live is still pretty conservative. We like nice stuff and we save up to buy the things we want. We have two car payments, a small rent payment, and smaller bills here and there but things do come up, like my hundreds of dollars of dental work that I have to get done in the next couple of months.
The way we are dealing with our money is the way we should have started with in the first place.
1. We are refinancing our highest car payment. Mike's car was bought hardly used last summer and we were paying around $460/month. We recently refinanced the car to a smaller percentage and the payments are now are $378/month. That may not seem like a HUGE difference but every little bit help. It's a savings of close to $80 a month.
On the negative, in order to refinance we had to stretch out the months but the Jeep is going to be in our family for a VERY long time.
2. Changing (and combining) our car insurance. I fell into the 16 year old norm of going under my parents car insurance when I started driving myself around the valley. 8 years later I'm still under my moms car insurance. I know, sounds lame, but my insurance is way cheap. We got Mike set up with his own policy when he bought the Jeep, but I am also on that policy too. So I'm double insured, which legally I need to be, but there is no reason to be only insured on my car, and then insured on mikes car too. We are getting a policy for BOTH of us, for BOTH cars. This makes no sense to you, I'm sure. But here is the fix:
Cancelled both of our old insurance companies and got on a new policy where we are actually saving $90 a month!! On car insurance!!
It is truly amazing what looking into your finances can do for you.
We have also been using large sums of money (some from the wedding, some from our tax returns) to finally pay off those really gross and ugly credit cards!! I hate credit. I really hope we never have another credit card in our lives. It has been the bane of our existence, the center of more than one fight and a total pain in the ass. Credit card companies are greedy rich assholes.
With paying off some credit, refinancing a car and changing insurance we are saving close to $300 a month!!
High fives readers, high fives!!!
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