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My husband and I have been together for almost 9 years next month. We actually moved in together when I was 18 years old.
When I was 18 I was going both to school full-time and working as a manager at Target full-time. Heath was working as a manager full-time also.
Man, I remember those days. We rented a small apartment, had no car payments and it just seemed like we had so.much.money.
We went on a lot of vacations, bought whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. I remember coming home from work with clothes, DVDs, anything I would pick up.
Back then we would use a checkbook to balance our account. I used to love sitting down and balancing the checkbook. I would feel so organized and would really get into it for a couple weeks, forget about it and then get into it again. Our bank made it really easy to check our account so I relied on that more.
Then we decided to buy a house. And get new cars. All of a sudden we had a huge mortgage payment and 2 car payments. Reality definitely set in. I had to start making budgets for groceries. We called each other before we made a purchase. We didn’t eat out as often.
When we had Hayden I tried going back to work full-time. We weren’t paying for daycare because Heath, my Mom and I were all working opposite schedules so we took turns caring for Hayden.
After only 3 weeks I realized there was no way I could work full-time. It was too hard on me and I wasn’t seeing Heath at all.
I was lucky enough to find a part-time job where I only worked about 20 hours a week.
So in addition to losing that full-time pay, we also had the added expense of having a baby. Now that was a real adjustment. I started budgeting our bills even more. I was able to cut down unnecessary options on our cable bill and phone bill.
That is really when I started paying attention to blogs. I would hunt the internet for coupon deals on groceries, diapers and wipes. I would get so excited when I would go to the store and save $5, then $10 and even $30 dollars off my bill once!
I really have trying to help out my Family Finances to me starting to blog myself. Some of my first posts are great deals that I found and wanted to share with friends and family.
I didn’t really continue blogging about frugal finds but I still read those blogs that continue to help me out with my finances!
Man, people really don’t realize how much a mortgage will impact your bottom line until they get one. It’s so hard to explain that it’ll change your life.
Unless you’re independently wealthy. Like me 😉