Budget

This morning I decided to re-vamp our budget. I made a nice pretty one back when we were living with Grandma, sometime around Decemeber, but at the time, it was all hypothetical. We weren't paying our own bills for much of anything. And then the program that I used crashed (wtf quattro pro? why are you broken? and why am I the only person on the internet to ever have this problem? I can't find it documented anywhere!) and so that budget rotted away.

But I'm an anxious one, and I've watched debt ruin both of my parents at different points of my life, so I really needed to figure things out. I opened up excel, which I have very limited experience with, and taught myself how to use it. I did add in a couple hypotheticals - car insurance for me - but I used a high estimate that I'd gotten - and after I did all the adding and subtracting we are making about $120 a month. I was very excited, until I came to a horrible realization.
 
We have three bills that we don't pay. My father pays my cell phone bill, and his parents pay for his car insurance and his health insurance. Once I added numbers for those in, we end up losing money. But actually, we could probably afford to pay our parents to pay our bills. Their bills are cheaper to pay than ours would be. My father pays an extra $10 a month for my cell phone, but if I had my own plan it would be at least $50/month. Same thing with Jeffrey's health and car insurances. We're borderline able to afford it all, through other people.

But for one moment in time, I was so proud of us. Not a lot of young couples in college get to say that they are doing it all on their own and saving money. For a brief moment I thought we were. Now, I'm determined to make it happen. I was already planning on getting a second job, but then I thought "eh, we're doing alright with me only working one." Now, I'm definitely going to (try at least to) get a second job for the rest of the summer.


Right now, even though we have student loans, we have enough money in savings to pay them back, and not totally drain our accounts. The only reason we haven't done it yet is because we may need that money to pay for me to go to school this upcoming year. My uncle still says he'll take care of it, but that didn't happen last semester (thus, the loans being taken out in the first place). Right now, if I don't pay back my loans immediately, I WILL still be able to afford to go back to school. And because of the type of loan they are, I don't acquire any interest on them while I'm in school. I'd still really like to pay them back, before they start acquiring interest, but right now, no rush.