Bills, Bills, Bills

I saw a post on a blog that I read semi-regularly that got me to thinking. Over at Getting Ahead, Jennifer talks about how many monthly bills they have. This got me to thinking about our current financial and bill paying situation. I think most people would be surprised at how many bills we actually pay each month. In fact, I think most people would be surprised to know how much we get by on each week.

As of today, we pay for HOA, internet, phone, car insurance, electric, one credit card bill and water. These are our monthly bills. We, of course, have annual bills such as property taxes and house insurance. Tallied up, our monthly bills, on average, come out to $435. That's nothing compared to a lot of people these days. I will say that we are extremely lucky, in that my parents let us use their second satellite dish, so we don't have to pay for TV, and they also have us included on their cell phone plan. We are on their plan simply because at one time we couldn't afford any phone and my mother being the loving, paranoid woman she is put us on her plan. Now, it's kind of second nature.

As I have said before, we are a one income family. My husband works hard and makes a decent living for us. That being said, there are a million things that we want to do in life. We love to travel and go new places. My husband loves guitars. So in an effort to actually afford the things we love and save for the future, we have made our monthly bills as small as possible. I believe that in times such as these, the way that we are living now is going to have to become the norm. Cut back, only have what you can actually afford, live simply. I'm glad that we have been living this way for as long as we have now. It has become natural for us.

As an aside, neither of us have always been so frugal and future minded. There was a time, in both of our seperate lives, that we were very spendy. We used credit inappropriately and often. That time was fun, but exhausting. We have both either paid our dues or are currently paying them now. We have come to the point we are now because we have no credit cards. We need to save for the things that we want to have or want to do. And that is how our current financial situation came about.

We live on $550 a week. Each week, $150 goes to paying our mortgage, $110 goes to paying bills, $50 goes to my parents to pay back what we owe them from past mistakes, my husband gets $50 a week to buy lunch and his extras, $20 goes to the Christmas fund, $100 (or more) goes right into savings, the rest is for groceries and gas for the van. We live very tightly to achieve our goals. I think most of our friends would be surprised at how little we have to work with and how much we can achieve on it.

This turned out to be a long rambly post. But, Getting Ahead got me thinking about how grateful I am that we can live on what we make now. It made me really look at how many bills we pay each month and realize that we aren't doing half bad. I am proud of my husband that he can support us and that he gave me the opportunity to stay home and raise our children. I am proud that he supports me as CFO of our family. I am most proud and thankful for what we do have right now.