I'm Back....Let's Hope for a Bit Longer this Time

Sorry for the absence...life just gets busy and when something had to give blogging was it.  I'll try to be better :)! 

So, what has prompted me to come back to blogging you ask?  It is the accountability of it.  Over Christmas we spent too much money....typical of us!  So, now we are trying to pay it off again.  Along with over spending at Christmas we also bought a third vehicle that came to us through family.  We thought having a van would be nice because we would finally have a vehicle that we could comfortably take more than 4 people in and for that purpose it has been fantastic!  However, as far as everything else goes it is looking more and more like a money pit.  When we decided to buy it we were well aware of this possibility.  We had done some research and found that some people absolutely loved the van and others were on the exact opposite end of the spectrum b/c it seemed like one repair after another for them.  But we were buying it from family and were getting a good deal on it and everyone really thought it was a great deal. 

So we laid out $3000 for the 2002 Chrysler van that had 70,000 miles on it.  Registration costs were about $500, then we had to pay for something related to the transmission which was another $400, and now there is something else wrong and we are looking at another $400.  We have also noticed that the DVD player doesn't work, the hatch will not always stay up and one of the automatically opening side doors has to manually be opened in order to get the automatic part of it to work (once you manually open it, it will automatically open for the rest of the ride, crazy huh!). 

A bit of explanation on why we didn't sell one of our vehicles when we got the van:

• We were afraid it might be the money pit we had read about and wanted to have a back up if we needed to.
• What we would have sold would have been the Honda and it is so beat up aesthetically and has 140K+ miles on it that we would not have gotten much for it.  So, now my husband drives it to work and is actually saving on gas mileage. 

So, now we have three vehicles and some Christmas credit card debt that amounts to about $5,500.  Thankfully, this should be close to paid off with our tax refund.  But, our refund will still fall a bit short.  Right now in order to quickly pay all of this off we are really focusing on our spending, which obviously got really out of hand during the holidays.  And that is why I am back to start documenting our financial journey again!

So, here is my first financial goal.....

• Between now and the end of February I only want to spend $166.50 on groceries. 

Although that seems like a small amount so far this month I have spent 333.50 on groceries.  This total includes the end of January and averages out to $100 a week.  I have stocked up pretty well, but I don't know if we will be able to do it.  Wish me luck!