I am working on scrutinizing the daily spending. The biggest cause of money "leak" has been my grocery buying schedule. I buy groceries a week at a time. I plan meals through Friday. But I don't go shopping until Sunday. So, saturday comes around and there are no groceries in the house. So we end up eating meals out all weekend. Major leak!!! This week, I got groceries on Friday night and we have not eaten out this weekend. Problem solved.

My next goal is to scrutinize the "fun" money. I need to find more family friendly activites that are free or low cost. Fortunately, we live in a very family oriented and active community. We have a lake, trails, great rec center, decent library, and the city as well as our community organizations provide lots of free or low cost activities. I will be working on scheduling are fun outings around those activities.

The third goal is to start scraping all extra money into savings. The savings accounts need to be bulked up in a desperate way.

It should be an interesting experiment to see how many "leaks" I can find and plug.

Went and got a haircut today. A little shorter but nothing crazy. Also bought a gift for my nephew's 7th bday. DS is heading over tonight for a sleepover so it will just be me, dh and dd. We are going to go to a ball game (minor league baseball). Should be a fun night.

Sat down and paid the medical bills yesterday. Still on track to get everything paid before end of year. The goal is to keep all deductible and coinsurance balances paid during the current year without carryover. There should be a few tests I won't need next year (bone marrow biopsy) so next year will be a little less.

I am hoping we don't melt tonight at the game. It's gonna be a hit one!!

Work has been going well the past couple of weeks and I think things are starting to settle. I am glad I made the decision to stick it out during this rough patch. Things seem to be turning around and my work life has become more manageable.

On the health front, I am currently doing some infusions for a low iron level. My next visit with the oncologist is 9/10. If things are holding steady, then I will continue to avoid chemo a bit longer. We are hopeful it will be a year or more before I need anything like that. And I am hopeful that the longer I can put it off, the faster medical science can work to my advantage. That magic leukemia pill has to be just around the corner. I am sure of it. :-)

Another payday this Friday will allow for a nice deposit into the savings account. This is the payday for medical bills and I will split $250 between the labs and the radiology department.

Today was a no spend day. Tomorrow I will need gas for the car as I have some work travel to do. I may have a cheap lunch out since I will be on the road a bit.

Hope everyone's week is going well.

Friday is payday for me and, in a wierd way, I am looking forward to paying bills. I have the new budget fine tuned and am looking forward to start on some of our new savings goals. It is helpful that hubby has 3 paydays in July. With the last of the catch-up mortgage payments made on 7/2, we should be looking good this month.

I have decided to try a budget with a mixture of auto draft payments for regular utility and savings payments and a cash-plan (or envelope system) for variables like groceries, entertainment and dining out. We will see how it goes.

I am thankful that we don't carry a ton of debt. We do have the one credit card which has $3500 on it. Paying it off in 12 months is my goal. I want to reduce the balance by half by Christmas. I am confident we can do it.

It has taken me a long time to get to this point where I feel good about the money we are making and I am confident we can accomplish the goals we have set. I have had a shift in priorities in the past couple of years. Having security and the possibility of retirement is more important than immediate goodies, fancy cars, or trips I cannot afford. It has taken us 15 years to get here.

Better late than never, right?

I had a nice 3 day weekend for the holiday...back to work tomorrow. I have decided to stay at my current company for primarily 2 reasons: 1. I really do enjoy my work and my coworkers and I just need to adopt a healthier attitude and manage my stress level. And, 2. I have worked 15 years to get where I am at now. To just walk away would be sad. I have decided that I will continue where I am at and reassess in January-if things are better then great. If not, then I will make a decision.

On the home front, things are going well. The July 1 mortgage payment included the last of the "catch-up" so going forward we are back to the regular payment (when hubby was laid off last year, mortgage company put us in forbearance which allowed us to skip two payments, since he is employed now, we are not eligible for renegotiation on the monthly, so we split the back payments into 4 and have been paying an additional $650 per month to catch up". With that done and paid, I feel like we can move on.

We will be setting up some more aggressive repayment and savings goals for the remainder of the year. I will update the side bar when the plans are finalized.

Hope everyone had a great 4th holiday!!