January's Budget was hard to keep balanced!

We worked all of January trying to get all the drywall hanged in the new part of the house. We worked everyday after work, and the weekends we didn't have our kids, cause they were with their other parents. We didn't work any overtime in January, so we had more time for work on our house. This made January our second lowest income month since we started our total money Makeover.

We thought we might have to dip into our emergency fund for the first time, but we just got by. We had Car repairs and not enough money saved for them, so we cash flowed the rest of the repairs out of January's budget. We also had higher costs for automobile fuel. I believe this was due to the fact of Hauling Drywall for our project.

Now that we have been on the total money makeover for over a year. I can start comparing our monthly budgets to the Prior year's monthly budgets. Here are some of the Big differences in this January as compared to January last year.

1. Automobile Fuel was $100 higher in 2011
2. Automobile Insurance was $50 Less in 2011
3. Our Income was $750 Lower in 2011
4. We don't have a Car Payment ($356) in 2011
5. Clothing we spent $80 Less in 2011.
6. Automobile Service was $155 higher in 2011

Things that were the about the same as last year.

Utilities (within $5)
Vacation Fund
House Insurance
Dish Network

At the end of the month we cut clothing out of our budget, since we got some new clothes around Christmas. And we had enough extra in our budget to Pay 171.97 extra on our debt. This month wasn't a great month. But we are happy to have paid extra on our debt, saved for future expenses, and did not use our emergency fund

Snow, Ice, and more Snow!

The last week has been crazy. We Live in the midwest, and was hit by a large ice storm where we live. Then it was followed by snow, and we got more snow yesterday.

As we are proactive in our finances we also were proactive for this storm. We heard the news about the storm and went and got food, candles, and water two days before it struck. I was working the evening of the storm, and night shift came in and said the stores were empty, and most supplies and food were sold out. Good thing we were proactive.

Some people I worked with ended up loosing power for 3 days, and had to stay at relatives houses. We only lost power for around 24 hours, and we stayed at our house. If the power didn't come on when it did we were thinking about going to stay with family.

We like to camp, so luckly we had camping stuff we could use when the power was out. We had a propane stove and a propane lantern setup in the garage to cook on, so we could still have hot meals. But, we didn't have anyway to heat the house. The house had gotten down to the lower 50's by the time the power came back on.

Looking at the bright side, I was able to pick up some extra hours at work because of the weather.