I know some of you were hoping that our move to Chicago for business school would instigate some budget-related posts that would echo the lifestyle of a typical grad-school-attending family, but as you’ve seen that hasn’t been the case with us. We have our mysterious “help” (seriously, let’s not get into this again, it’s just the way things are in the business world and I suggest you do some googling if you’d like to figure it out) and that combined with the significant raise TH will experience when he returns to work at Company X means that we can live our life the way we do.

We decided that we would rather spend $$ for 6 years, than spend $$ for two, then $ for another two, then $$$ for another two.

After T1 was born, I stopped categorizing my purchases in Mint and our budget fell by the wayside for many, many months. (If you missed it the first time you can read a little bit about our budget system here. We’ve made a few tweaks and someday TH will guest post to explain things a little better, but that’s all I have for now.) Once the holiday break started That Husband had the time to sit down and try to get things back in shape, a process that took over a month. He did most of the work leaving transactions marked as TBD when he didn’t know what they were. I finished my side of the categorizing last week, and when we imported everything into our spreadsheet we found that we were spending $$$$ in a few areas, $$$ in most, and only a few sections had avoided turning this very accusing red color that says “That Wife, you suck at not spending all the money!”

Our goal is to walk away from business school with no debt, and at the rate we are going there is absolutely no way that’s going to happen. We sat down and talked about the red areas, and made some plans regarding changes we’ll have to make to make it through until Fall of 2012. Here are a few areas where we are really going to be concentrating:

Food

Food has become a black hole for me. Remember when we were eating for $250/month? Ha! Those were the days. Once the farmers market closed and I had to start visiting the grocery store again I started to flounder. Moving is difficult because you have to build up your supplies again, so some of our money was spent on staples like oils and flour, but certainly not all of it. I started hitting up Whole Foods for the organic selection, the bulk foods options, and because it’s the only place I will buy fresh fish, but it was really more like Whole Paycheck because I was spending so much there. Our winter meat CSA has been awesome, but the vegetable one just isn’t big enough to feed both of us for two weeks without trips to the grocery store as well.

Our plans for cutting back include focusing on eating what we have in the cupboard, pairing simple ingredients together. I’m going to stop listening to people who tell me I have to eat fresh leafy greens every day or my diet sucks. Organic is important to me and organic leafy stuffs are out of season right now and imported from who knows where so they are really expensive! If we want to eat organic we’re going to have to eat a lot of potatoes, onions, squash, and a few canned and frozen things. I’m also saying goodbye to Whole Foods to start wandering the aisles of Hyde Park Produce and Treasure Island once again. Anyone who reads my food blog knows we eat very few processed foods but I’ve got to work harder to cut them out even further. If you want to eat organic on a small budget, anything that is both organic & processed has to go!

We’re still certainly going to spend more the $250/month on food until the spring, but I’m hoping I can cut back to the point where we spend a little more in the winter, a little less in the summer, and it all balances out in the end.

When it comes to eating out as a couple/family, we just don’t. Before the date we had in Utah we actually hadn’t been out to eat together as a couple since… May, I think. We picked up food at different restaurants a few times while we were moving and didn’t have our stuff for a few weeks, and once I massacred dinner in such a way that I lost all motivation to prepare anything and we ordered something and had it delivered. Other than that it’s all yours truly puttering around in the kitchen to prepare our meals. Unfortunately even after all those months of waiting we are still several hundred dollars (!!!) in the hole when it comes to our eating out budget due to a very indulgent night on New Years Eve and another in celebration of my birthday a few weeks before T1 was born. This makes me a very sad panda as we were supposed to go to out to eat tonight before we go to Wicked (hooray!) because I was sure that after all of these months things would be back in black once again. When we got Mint straightened out we discovered I was wrong and so our reservation for C-House tonight is cancelled. I really want to eat at Alinea but the experience is so expensive that we’ll have to save up for almost an entire year to go! Yet another reason I need to start making more money with That Wife, so I can go out and eat with my husband!

Clothing

I gained enough weight that “getting by with my regular clothes” simply wasn’t an option. A lot of skinny little women talk about just using a rubber band on their jeans and wearing some looser shirts to get by. Ha! Now that the baby is out you can see how much of the weight I gained went to my body and not to my belly. I needed actual maternity clothes! I tried to buy a combination of nicer pieces and some cheap stuff at Old Navy/Target. I should have enough to make it through my next pregnancy without needing new stuff, but we have no exceptions for baby built into the clothing budget section, so that area is deep in the red. I definitely have champagne taste on a beer budget (would the Mormon equivalent of that be Martinelli taste on a Sprite budget?) when it comes to clothes though, so the clothing budget was already suffering.

I’m hoping my commitment to only buy thrifted clothes until I lose weight will help me in this area. And actually, when I came home and modeled my clothes for TH, even though I did so on the very night where he figured out how much I had been overspending he actually sat me down and said that he’d like to increase my monthly clothing budget allotment, in part because I look so much better in clothes that actually fit, and because he knows fashion is important to me.

Health

We spent far too much on my teeth this year, because I am really awful about flossing (ever) and brushing (at night). I know, I’m like a small child with my oral hygeine. No head-scratching necessary to figure out how to cut back in this area. Flossing and brushing nightly, here I come!

My home birth experience cost us close to $5000 with all of the visits, supplements, tests, and the actual delivery itself. I’m currently weighing whether I’m willing to fight the system, have the baby in a hospital, and save a LOT of money

Jenna-Other

Yet another black hole of mine, literally, as it’s the place where all miscellaneous spending goes. Mailing out items for That Wife contests, eating out without TH, hosting and other blog related fees, my bodybugg, birth photography, and other extras that don’t really fit into a category. My options here are to just never eat out with friends, stop hosting That Wife, and basically not have any “fun money”, OR to make some money and pay this off and continue to have some fun. I’m going to go with the make more money option!

One reason this has been so hard to take care of is that we’re working with a running budget, tracking all spending since we were married in 2008. Whenever I overspend I need to either make a whole lot of money to pay that back off, or cut back severely to wait until the money builds back up again. That’s really hard to do, especially in areas like clothing when my weight keeps soaring up and down like a hot air balloon.

Some good news is that I’m closer to paying off Jenna Cole than I originally thought! I’ve been working to cut back on administrative costs and I’ve stockpiled a more than ample supply of equipment for wedding and portrait sessions, so no more big purchases need to be made for awhile. My parents also made some investments for me while I was growing up, and it’s been a long process to retrieve the money from them, the first time because they mailed me a check and it got lost, and the second time because I lost the paperwork that told me where I had the money invested! Quite dumb of me I know, but now everything is fixed and I’ll be able to use that money to pay off the “clothing” and “Jenna-other” categories. How nice to have those sections building up instead of paying down! I also get to give myself a pat on the back in regards to the “personal care” area of the budget. I’ve done such a good job at cutting back in that area that I actually have a nice little surplus… which I shortly plan on taking with me to Sephora to stock back up on thing. :)

A side note to say thank you to those who have signed up for and used Ebates using my referral link. You’ve earned me over $250 so far, which helps pay for hosting fees and the money I put toward contests I hold! Thank you to all those who signed up!

Overall we’re going to do fine. It’s certainly a good thing we sat down and hashed this out right now because we would have been in serious trouble 6 months from now if our spending patterns (yes, there are actually areas where TH will have to be a little more careful as well!) didn’t change, but I won’t need to write any posts with step-by-step guides on how to apply for student loans. This actually isn’t the hard stage of our budgeting, things are going to be a lot harder for me when we return to Company X and are surrounded by people who increase their standard of living because their pay increased and we keep ours the same because we lived so comfortably during school. We’re trying so hard to remember that once we start spending a certain amount it’s going to be incredibly difficult to adjust our lifestyle to spend less later on. The most substantial people are the most frugal, and make the least show, and live at the least expense. ~ Francis Moore

That Husband has been working on a post that better explains how our budgeting works, explaining how we’ve streamlined things a lot more and made it even easier to keep track of our expenses, but he’s in the middle of applying for summer internships (so we can know where we are going to be living this summer!) and thus it might be a little while before he finishes. Keep your fingers crossed that we get to go somewhere really cool after all this work he’s putting in!

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