It's no secret that in spite of my financial education and background, I'm budgetarily-challenged. We tend to spend what we spend and then lament it after the fact rather than plan ahead about what we want to spend and stick to a budget. We budget in reverse basically, which really isn't a strategy I'd ever recommend to anyone.

One of our biggest weaknesses is food. We spend anywhere from 50-100% more than the average family of four. In real… Read More

Last night the dog woke me by throwing up on the bedroom floor at 2AM. I think he has a stomach bug, but I was up and I had a hard time getting back to sleep. It was storming pretty loudly and my mind drifted, as it sometimes does, to imagining Very Bad Things. I started to think about how bad the roads are in the bad weather and what I would do if something ever happened to my husband.
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On Saturday morning, Dave went to a local gun show with his friend John. For the first time ever, my husband actually has his own friends, friends he sees independently from me. It warms my heart and I love that he goes off on these little "man dates" alone. I think every human being should have friends. It's a priority: food, shelter, clothing, FRIENDS.

The best part of this new development is that John is my friend Tana's husband. … Read More

Because it falls right on the heels of our anniversary, David and I have never really paid much attention to Valentine's Day as a romantic holiday. We usually buy each other cards and he might pick up a box of my favorite See's Candy (Butterscotch Squares and/or Milk Chocolate Bordeaux's just for the record), but other than that, we don't do much. It's an impossible night to find a babysitter and even if we do find one, the restaurants are… Read More

Over the long weekend, David and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. It's hard to believe, but I found the man of my dreams at 19 and married him at 21. I consider myself lucky to have found him. That said, staying married? Is hard. It's probably the hardest thing I've ever done, right up there with childbirth. I can see why divorce rates are still so high - Dave and I have good communication, lots in common and we… Read More

This month we've chosen to make two big changes to our finances:

1. We're refinancing our mortgage. We happened to have made the offer on our home literally the same week that the bottom fell out of the secondary mortgage market. This means the rate on our first mortgage is decent, but our second is a little over 10%. That was a huge shock for us, since we had originally been quoted something closer to 7%. In the spur… Read More