Head above water.

I finally feel like my head is slowly coming back above water.... I don't know why I went down under, but I'm making my way back up!

The menu is on the fridge, and a mammoth pile of bills are paid and ready to go out the door. Plus, we have a separate account payment system for medical bills. Those are also completely caught up and d-o-n-e!

It's such a good feeling to be caught up.... but also to know where every dollar is going. To say that the month of August was over budget would be correct. Our dining out expenses alone pretty much killed our budget.

It is SO easy to just forget about the budget and go out to dinner. Going anywhere for dinner seems better than cooking at the time. (Until you get the bill.) I can see why folks use the envelope system now. It definitely would have helped curb the dining out expenses we incurred this past month. No doubt about it!

So, even though this month has already begun.... I am starting our own envelope system, for groceries, dining out and gas. Those are the three main ones that we seem to go over on in regards to our budget. That should really help us to stick to our budget this month. As I mentioned before we have been using our credit card to earn points for our hotel stay in Moscow. But, I believe we have enough for now... and it's more important in my mind to curb some of that spending and see how well we can stick to our budget.

I will say that thankfully we have still been able to pay off our credit card bill each month. Unfortunately, it hasn't left a whole lot of anything for savings. I'll write more about savings and that mindset in a future post. :-)