On Tuesday this week I left work early and went to speak with a councilor at CCRI (Community College of Rhode Island) and before I left I signed up for a 7 week certificate program to become a 'teachers assistant'. My goal is to work with developmentally challenged kids (or maybe adults) at some point. Its no secret that I hate my job and even though I know that if I leave I will make less money, I think it will be worth it and my wife is on board and supportive! So I put the $270 for the certificate program on my credit card (I'll get 1% cash back on that!) and I'll figure out how to pay it when the bill is due next month!
After I left CCRI I went to Woonsocket hospital where my sister-in-law had just delivered a baby (via C-Section) a few hours earlier. I have to be honest, I don't understand how people afford having kids. If both parents have to work, and most of the time they do, then daycare costs a fortune and just the first few years of diapers and formula are thousands of dollars! So here is a question for you, if you have kids, how do you afford it!? Even if a kid is not spoiled they still need stuff and its not like before you had a kid you had thousands of extra dollars laying around right!?
Her is a picture of me & Lily Winters. In this photo I'm 39 years old and shes about 7 hours old.
Well... seeing as I didn't really have a topic this week I think I'm gonna just get to the money talk. This week I got a paycheck for $593.62 (about $22 less than usual because I left a little early one day last week) and I had $37.65 added to my 401K. I'm going to take $50 and put it in my quarterly loan payment account and put the remaining $543.62 into the mortgage checking account. I also did my weekly $20 vacation transfer in preparation for Octobers vacation! I will let you in on a little secret, making that transfer put my checkbook 'in the red' and it currently shows a negative balance, but thanks to my 'hidden' money its only negative in my checkbook register and not in the actual balance! I'll get that all cleared up in the next week or so and just hope it doesn't go to far 'negative' before then!
Also, since this is week #25 it means that I have saved $500 just by making that weekly $20 transfer! Even if you only did $10 you would have $250, hell even $5 a week would be $125! I implore you to set up a weekly transfer from your checking to a savings account... start small and build up, but don't let any more weeks slip by, start saving today!
Here is the week 25 wrap up:
$37.65 to my 401K
$20.00 to my vacation fund
$50.00 in the quarterly loan payment account
Which makes the 2013 totals:
$500.00 in the vacation fund
$48.05 in the piggy bank
$350.00 in the quarterly loan payment account
$100.00 in my vet bill savings
$858.00 in my money market
$857.99 in my car account
For this weeks bonus I will just give you a quick preview of next week. It is the last check of the month which means it should be 100% saving, but I think I'm only going to save about 1/3-2/3's of it. I will have some deposit cans/bottles returned by then, but I think I'm in a slight re-evaluation mode of my 'excessive' saving and I might ease back a little. We'll see if I can stick to that or not next week.
Please check out the Facebook group here: www.facebook.com/groups/OCDSavings
Also send in your thoughts on how money changes and how you pay for things once you have kids. Were does that extra money come from? What do you go without? What changes?
To answer your kid question... Its just more juggling. You find a way to give your kids what they need, and more often than not, what they want also.
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