Money Monday

Morning ya'll!

I'll be honest here; I'm just too busy to keep this up on a weekly basis.  I know, you're like "Right.  You're a SAHM.  How can you be busy?".  Trust me, I am.  We're entering prime dance season for M and I'll be going constantly to get her to practices and rehearsals.  Top that off with still teaching her Mon-Fri as well as taking care of K and keeping the house up and I just don't have the time for my typical long drawn out posts.  Money Monday will either be taking a back seat for the next 5 weeks or if I have the chance I'll put up small tidbits of useful information.  It just depends on how crazy life gets.  Today will be a small tidbit of useful information.

This is how we handle those pesky annual bills.  You know the ones: insurance, tags, taxes, etc.

What we do is figure out how much said item will run us, divide by 12 (for a years worth of savings) and put that much away.  By the time the bill is due, the money's already saved up and we don't have to struggle to come up with it all at one time.  For example, we save $9 a month for our AAA membership.  By the time the bill is due in the fall, we've got all the money sitting there waiting for the statement to show up.  I transfer it out of ING to our main account, write a check and it's all taken care of!  It's much easier than trying to come up with $108 all at one time.  We save monthly for our car tags (they're due every 2 years), for gifts (including Christmas) and for school supplies/clothes.  You have no idea how nice it is to go to buy school supplies/clothes and have no problem getting what is needed.  It gives me a sense of accomplishment!

So you may wonder how I keep track of how much is saved for what.  I'm not a numbers genius by any means.  I don't dabble in Excel for fun, or have spreadsheets coming out of my ears. As I stated before, we have various ING accounts in which we park our money.  The good thing about ING is that you can have many accounts, each titled something different.  We have an account that I use for our transfers to ING.  Once it clears, I then disperse money from the transfer account into the correct account: tags, school, AAA, gifts.  It keeps track of it easily and I even earn interest on it!  I absolutely LOVE my ING accounts and would be happy to refer anyone who would like to start an account.  Email me and I'll hook you up.

That's all I've got for this week.  If you haven't already heard the news, the Stimulus checks will start going out this week.  Here's an article with the details.  What will you be doing with your "free" money (free is in quotes b/c you do know you'll have to claim that on next year's taxes right?)?  We'll be getting some car repairs done and putting the rest into our emergency fund.

Have a great week!

Comments

[Huckdoll]

I love ING - we have a few accounts there, plus our RRSPs (not sure what they're called in the States - something K's??) Anyway, I adore your idea about saving monthly for even minor bills - I'd never think of saving for $108, but the concept makes things so much more simple and less threatening to ones checking account.