Follow Up on Flex Month February

Considering that this was our second technical flex month, and the first real flex month, I figured i'd give some feedback.

The good

• We got a bunch of stuff for organization around the house
• We enjoyed going out a bit and having fun
• It took a little stress off of us with having to not buy the house and wedding planning and the like

The bad

• We were a little too flexible. We had to dip into savings for about $100.
• It's really hard to come off a flex month back into a tight month

The Conclusions

We've decided that for our next flex month (May) that we'll structure it a bit more. We're going to take $150 each and do with it as we please. That still gives room for advancing any accumulated projects that need cash thrown their way without blowing the budget out of the water.

There goes March's budget!

We're struggling to keep grocery and food expenses in check. That's the primary struggle that we have in both flex and non-flex months.

I'd like them much better if they were half off!

In the interest of keeping food expenses down, we're in the middle of a 40 day eating out fast. We are not allowed to spend a single penny on restaurants, convenience stores, or other prepared and served foods until April 14th. 

Also, in the interest of keeping our liabilities down, we've put ourselves on a path to pay for our wedding as the expenses come. We were originally borrowing money since we were saving for a house while paying for the wedding, but with some of the down payment cash, we paid off the outstanding money owed for the wedding.

We used the rest of the down payment to pay off a few pesky balances and loans, and funded a decent start to an emergency fund.

Our next projects financially and homelife wise are to pay down the one student loan left, try to cut food costs in half (or as close as we possibly can), and start preparing for this fall, when we expect to be down to one income and paying 2 graduate school bills.

WOTD: Tentativeness - unsure; uncertain; not definite or positive; hesitant:

I think that a bit of tentativeness regarding our finances for the next few months is warranted. After all, we're trying to do it all at once.

Flex Month February

"I have nothing to do with this post, but I am the most random result for the word 'flex' ever!"

February was a "flex month" for Lauren and I. This means that we were not beholden to our usual budget.

I think that's our budget on top. 

We are lucky enough to be in a good financial situation, so we can afford to have a 2:1 ratio of strict months to flex months. We also haven't settled on a definition of "flex month", which is probably a very bad thing.

We've had one flex month before (the first month we did a combined budget), but that was more of an "adjust to being on a new budget" month than a "we did this on purpose" month.

February is a flex month because of the fact that we pulled out of an offer on a house and effectively slammed the door on house searching for the next 6 months at minimum. While we weren't distraught, we lost motivation for saving $thousands each month for some frenzied push to buy a house. The cash on hand went to paying off all of her credit card balances, the wedding card balance, and her student loan, making her debt free coming into the marriage.

I'm the schlub of the relationship, bringing $8500 of student loans into the relationship (out of the $16k that I had coming out of school a year and a half ago).

Anyway, since we aren't in dire financial straits, and we don't anticipate any huge (5 figure) expenses in the near future, we decided to loosen the belt a little this month.

I think, looking back at how we did it, there are some changes that we will make in the future. First, we are still going to have a budget. This month, we effectively broke even. While not "bad" per se, that isn't a good outcome either. There were so many fast food trips, useless shopping trips, and wasteful spending that we could have easily saved $500 with a little self control.

However, this did allow us to make a few large purchases that we were putting off due to the house. We wanted a nice camera for our honeymoon and a stand mixer.

Kitchenaid Artisan Stand Mixer

Nikon D3100

We paid for half of the purchases with some Amazon gift cards that I got from work, making the effective cost of the mixer, the camera, 2 lenses, and a bunch of camera accessories around $450.

We also paid for some wedding stuff, including an antique wash basin. We also got some cast iron skillets and a cutting board, all from the local antiques mall. 

I feel like, even though we went a bit overboard, we got some good things accomplished in the flex month, using the added freedom to get a couple things that we were putting off.

Just a couple tips for doing a flex month of your own:

• Make sure you can actually afford a flex month
• Set limits on the spending (we learned it a little bit the hard way)
• Use the money for things that you've been wanting for a while, not just candy and Taco Bell
• Don't make every month a flex month. I think 2:1, 3:1, or 5:1 ratios are best for flex months.

Finally, the word of the day is affranchise - to free from a condition of obligation.

The flex month affranchises us from our strict budget, giving us a little more freedom to buy off-budget items on occasion.

Wedding budgeting 101

Planning a wedding is a major stressor in a loving couple's young relationship. It involves a bunch of laborious decisions, painful compromises, and mind-numbingly large costs.

If only the ring was the worst expense!

Start the planning for the wedding well in advance! You should know about how much of a ring you can afford before you even start shopping for the ring, and you should also tailor that ring's cost to the cost of the wedding. That way you know, even before proposing (or being proposed to), a ballpark of the wedding will cost. (If you're getting a $500 ring, you're likely not having a $100k wedding; If you're getting a $50k ring, you're likely not having a $5k wedding)

After the Proposal

Now starts the full fledged chaos. This is a great time to sit down and hammer out a basic budget. By doing this now, you're setting basic limits on how far this spectacle can go. How do you start? Good question.

1. Get a basic feel for how much you're able to contribute. This has a bunch of factors that play into it. How much is family going to contribute? How much debt are you comfortable going in to? We did our budget assuming the family contributes $0, and that we'd have the entire wedding paid off in 6 months, including saving a down payment for a house at the same time. 
2. Get estimates for the big 3 expenses: venue, photographer, and music. With that estimated, you should be able to get a feel for where exactly you can set your wedding budget.
3. Set an actual number value as your maximum budget for the entire wedding. This is the "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" line that dictates all future decisions
• Another good idea is to draw a "DANGER WILL ROBINSON" line a little bit lower than the max budget, which is the goal maximum. This is the yellow light to the max budget's red.
• It is very important to stick to this budget! You can very easily snowball toward disaster if you take this number lightly. All changes to the max budget should be considered very carefully before being agreed to.
• With this information, you can also formulate how you are going to pay for the wedding.
4. Get as much of a list of all the expenses as possible made up (in priority order). You won't get everything in the first try, and many of the expenses will be off, but you'll have a general idea of what you can spend on each category.
5. Decide what is important enough to hire out, and what is worth your time and effort to do yourself. We have decided to do a bit of the wedding ourselves, including the invitations, food, and more. This will save you tons of cash that can be put to higher priorities.

In the months prior to the wedding

As you start contracting for services and buying different things for the wedding, keep a running tally of how you're doing on the budget front. This is best achieved through a spreadsheet. Either you can make one yourself, or you can download one from the internet, but if you don't know where you are relative to your "SHALL NOT PASS" line, you're in trouble.

The nice thing about this is that as a guy,  I don't have to be involved in the day to day decision making of the wedding. All I need is a number to plug into a spreadsheet and any adjustments that need to be made to the estimated costs. She can also reference the spreadsheet and see if things are ok, or if they need to be changed.

Added benefits

Beyond the fact that you're more likely to end up not breaking the bank over your wedding, budgeting for the wedding has some added benefits.

• You're getting in good habits for the future
• You're keeping one another accountable for your finances
• There are less "oh my gosh, did we forget ____?" moments
• You have a road map to getting all the tasks done
• Many brides work better when they have a couple reasonable constraints rather than being given a blank check (regardless of whether that check will bounce)
• Family may be more inclined to help out if they see that you've planned ahead

The pains of being frugal

Lauren and I recently put down an offer on a house. We knew that the offer was significantly above what we felt the home was worth, and above our budget. This was primarily a tactical move to try to get the price down by forcing appraisal. There really was no downside, it cost $500 to put the offer along with get the appraisal, and we thought we could potentially save $10k-20k on the house's sale price.

In our current situation, there's no question that we could afford the house, and then some. We're currently paying $50 more per month for our combined rents than the mortgage was quoted at, and were able to save up a 5 figure down payment in 4 months. Things would be fine.

An artist's representation of a house that looks
 nothing like the one we offered on.

However, things are never that simple, are they? Lauren is planning on going to school in the fall, as am I, and we will be going down to one income. My preliminary calculations had us ok up to $10k less than our offer, but those calculations were done quickly and months before the offer. Our "ok" range had crept up slightly since then as we had been exposed to the pricing in the neighborhood, and out of lack of diligence to keep our eyes on the prize. The shock was the preliminary calculation of the monthly payment for the mortgage. It was about $200 higher than expected. At that point it was spreadsheet time.

No, I didn't do a paper spreadsheet, I've actually used a computer before

I tossed together a conservative budget for this fall, and set up a variety of different scenarios, including contract price, $10k less, $20k less, $30k less, and keeping my apartment. We found that we couldn't afford contract price, but could afford $10k less, assuming that we paid off a handful of small debts hanging around. Shockingly it matched up pretty well with the quick calculation I had done 6 months earlier. Now, it all depended on what the appraisal came back at.

After a few days, the appraisal came back, $2k over the contract price. We had already decided that the cutoff for even considering it was $10k under contract, so we terminated immediately and walked away. So much for our first outing in real estate. It is a really great house, but just a smidgen outside our budget.

This is NOT what our pockets look like after walking away!
But, it is how we feel.

Thankfully, with the cash saved up, we were able to pay off all of our credit card debts, both wedding debt and previous lingering stuff, and we have a bit left over for a) paying cash for wedding stuff, b) paying off student loans, c) paying for school, and d) emergency fund.

This was a heart wrenching week, but it was also one of the more peaceful resolutions to the week. We're taking the more sane route, and sticking in the apartment for at least 6 months once we get married.

We have a good plan for the next two years in regards to our finances, which will allow us to get back into the market and buy a house as early as next spring/summer. First, we're gonna pay down heavily on our student loans, while in parallel paying for our wedding in cash. That will free up $310/month as early as March to roll into knocking out the biggest and last student loan. With $530/month paying into that loan, it should be gone in 1.5 years, assuming that we don't get any bonuses, gifts or other non-paycheck income. Alongside that, we'll be saving around $650/month for emergency fund and down payments. After we get all student loans knocked out (and assuming that we don't have to take any more for our current schooling), we'll be able to afford the neighborhood that we want with more comfort and on one income.

To wrap back to the title of the post, we could have afforded the house technically, and the loan officer was actually kinda perplexed that we said we couldn't afford it. However, it would've guaranteed student loans and all but guaranteed more credit card debt if we exceeded our budget even by a penny. That's the hallmarks of a bad decision, and we avoided that.

WOTD: Consolation -a thing that is a source of comfort in a time of disappointment

Our ability to get on more solid financial footing was a good consolation after having the house deal fall through.

Quick Hit: Simplifying Life

I found a good article on cleaning, decluttering, and overall trying to simplify life. It's 72 simple easy steps (i found it hilariously ironic) to simplify your life.

Charity and frugality

This is my first post where I try to mix religion and finances. Let's see how bad I botch it.

Using common sense of the modern era, if you're struggling to make ends meet, the first thing to cut would be charity to others. After all, you're struggling to pay your own bills, you can't afford to pay for other people.

Despite the fact that it is counterintuitive, there are several reasons that not cutting charity may be a good idea.










God says so. This is a biggie in Scripture. You are to give your "firstfruits" to God. That implies having it be the last to be cut, not the first. Proverbs 3:9 says "Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce;"

Some may find this less than compelling for whatever reason. I like to try to dig a bit deeper and answer the question "why?" whenever God says so.

It puts you in good habits. When you're donating to charity, you're having to plan ahead, live with less, and work within your means. Charity donation is a bellwether for the rest of your finances. What you do with charity tends to reflect into the entire budget.

It keeps you from being selfish. This is a big theme throughout the Bible. God expends much effort trying to convince us that focusing on the self is the wrong way to go. You can see some of the consequences of this in your personal finance. It's a common theme in personal finance circle that the big purchases aren't the killers, it's the little ones. The little ones which, more often than not, start out with a simple mantra. "I've been good so far, so I deserve...". Once you get a case of the "I deserve"s, you're in trouble. Your budget will become less of an ironclad contract and more of a suggestion as selfishness and instant gratification take hold.

It "pays it forward". Whether it be karmic justice, or the genuine goodwill of helping others, it's a rare instance when one regrets being charitable. If you can derive joy from helping others, it helps to cure some of the spending urges and impulses that you develop due to boredom and depression. This, however implies more than just monetary charity, but getting out and helping the community.

It keeps your budget in check. If your budget is properly designed, you have a little extra breathing room for emergencies that may come up. If charity is on the chopping block every time the car needs an oil change, then your priorities may be skewed. Use your emergency fund, cut extra money from your fun budget, re calibrate your budget in a more charity friendly way. There are many ways to avoid the "well I had to take the dog to the vet" type excuses for not donating.

Finally, I would recommend that you do a self-inventory and figure out why you're donating or not donating to charity. Are you donating because of compassion, or is it out of some warped sense of guilt? Are you not donating because you're too absorbed in yourself, or because it's not important enough for you to use your money on? This will help you prioritize your charitable giving, and may help you understand why it's so easy to throw charity under the bus when things go wrong. Only you can decide where charity belongs in your budget.

WOTD: Delectation - enjoyment

Once you understand your motivations toward charity, you will take better delectation in it.

Apartment Garden Plan for Spring 2013

Following up on last weeks "I suck at gardening" post, I have started to plan for a garden for this spring!


Evidently timing is crucial down here, as to avoid baking your plants in the ground.

I've been looking at this thread on planting calendars for north Texas.

This calendar in specific:

The plan is to try to do a handful of easier plants out in the tree gardens, and maybe get an herb or two going in the window box planters.

Out in the tree gardens are going to be radishes, green onions (scallions), some type of hot pepper (habanero or jalapeno), tomatoes, and kale.

Good news on the kale front! I saw some parts of the previously left for dead kale seem to be green and growing, albeit slowly. I moved the two kale stalks to the good garden (the one that gets water from the irrigation system).

I've also found a good use for my fish tank waste water. That water is about as good as you can get without dumping Miracle-Gro in the bucket. I regularly fertilize the water for my aquatic plants, and the fish detritus is an amazing natural fertilizer as well. Rather than dump the water into the yard or down the toilet, i've started to dump it onto the garden. We'll see whether that works out in the long run. I figure the weekly boost of 5 gallons of fertilized water will be the start of marked improvement in plant health.

The plan is to get seeds in early February for the radishes, onions, peppers, and tomatoes. I'll try to grow the tomatoes in a pot or window box  before transplanting out into the tree gardens. While i'm buying the vegetables, i'll see if there are any good herb seeds. If so, i'll jump on that as well. Hopefully this will be a good year for eating off my own land, even if  I can touch all four corners of my land from one spot!

I have some leftover mulch from last year that I plan on using to protect the plants from the heat and retain water, so hopefully I don't need any more than I already have. I'm hoping to keep this entire project under $15.

Hopefully there are many updates to come, and I'll post pictures once there's anything to take a picture of.

WOTD: Previse - To notify in advance.

I have been prevised of the difficulties of growing vegetables in Texas, yet I choose to try anyway.