Money......

A friend of mine has 5 children and is also a SAHM. She actually takes her husband's paycheck and withdraws cash for different funds: grocery shopping, telephone, etc...and puts the money in little plastic baggies. If she has money left over each month it becomes her pocket money...We, on the other hand...use the ATM card basically until it is rejected.....

How do you organize what you spend each month and leave something over for yourself? I'm actually leaning towards trying out my friend's method!

Kris

I have to tell you Kris, my life is in my Palm Pilot! There's a little program I use called "Expense Plus." It tracks all of our expenses for the month and categorizes them. At the end of the month, we see where we have spent our money. As for saving some for ourselves, I have not had a paycheck in 4 months so it will be awhile! I'm interested to hear what everyone here has to say...

-Rachel

How do we organize the moolah (what little there is )? QUICKEN!!! It's a lifesaver. We do all of our banking on-line and it makes things sooooo easy and quick, plus it makes taxes a breeze. Jon and I sit down after he gets every paycheck, go through and prioritize bills (alas, many times we cannot pay them all) and make sure to leave just enough left over to feed us and do auto maintainance, doc copays, etc. We used to do the thing where you use the debit card until it doesn't work anymore and it got us into some deep trouble! We also have now paid off all but one of our credit cards and have decided to swear them off for a while - we'll get a new one in a couple of years and ONLY for travel most likely (and we're darn well going to make sure it accrues frequent flier miles).

Jennifer