New Job

I apologize for the severe lag in posting. We have been in the process of creating new routines in my household as Don has recently begun a new job as a car Salesman working for Volkeswagon. So we are adjusting to a different schedule and learning how to make our new lives flow. It's been a bit of a challenge for a plan ahead person like myself to deal with and learn how to live on the fly with a lot of unknown variables. But now that we have some sort of schedule, even though it's different, I can get back to what I do best. Plan ahead, budget, and execute.

I've done reasonably well with the spending during the past couple of weeks, particularly considering that my sister was visiting for five days and we were in "vacation mode." Vacation and visitors are always tricky but we did find some excellent cheapskate activities to enjoy while she was here which I will be posting soon. Unfortunately not many pictures to share as we were a little lazy with the camera.

Back to Don's new job. With the new job comes of course new income and cash flow to the household. As a car salesman, Don work's primarily off of commission. He does however have a modest hourly wage that he can fall back on in case there is a bad month. As to be expected, there will be an ebb and flow to car sales that could easily result in feast or famine. So basically, I've decided to set our budget based off of famine. That way, we will continue to live a modest lifestyle that we know we can support, and extra income will be just that, extra income. So then it's just a matter of determining priorities for the extra incomes. We have that small list of items that are not necessities, and I'd like to build our savings back up again which we completely descimated to pay Uncle Sam. But for me, the biggest financial itch I have to scratch is paying down our debt. I'm really feeling the burden of our car payment and wanting that to be gone as soon as humanly possible. Eliminating that one bill alone will improve our annual cash flow by more than $5000. So as far as my vote is concerned, that's the bulk of where our dollars will be going until it's paid off.