Oil and Shine

I spoke a little about emergency funds in an earlier post .  What exactly is one and why do you need one?  In our family we have a lot of “emergencies” that arise. Just last month we had an unexpected bill and had to tap into our emergency fund. In my mind, an emergency is something you did not plan on in your budget, but needs to done. For example, an unexpected medical bill or unplanned repairs to your car.  My husband and I started using a budget with an emergency fund after we had a lot of debt from credit cards. If something unexpected happened, we would just use the credit card and we went further and further into debt. We knew something needed to change, and using a budget has greatly helped us stay out of debt.   One emergency we've dealt with happened when we lived in Portland. We had a snow storm close to Christmas.  There was over two feet of snow with drifts over four feet tall in places. In our front yard it almost came to the top of our fron...

Budgets!   That is a bad word to some people, but it doesn't have to be.  I am not perfect at keeping within our budget at times and this is an area I am trying to work on.   I know I am not alone. What are some tips to help with your budget? One tip I want to share is saving up for bigger items and paying for it all at once. We needed a new couch because our old one was wearing out.  So we decided to save up for a new one.  In the meantime, I tried to cover the stains and holes in our old one with blankets. While we were saving up the money, I did research so I knew what I wanted to buy beforehand and about how much money we would need to save.  We set money aside each month in our budget when we could. The day we went to purchase our new couch I had a good idea of what I wanted.  I was excited as I found what I was looking for.  My husband and I bought the couch in full-which felt great and then we went home and waited a couple weeks for it to a...