Saturday, December 20, 2008

No more spending!



I've been catching up on our finances the last couple of days, transferring money from savings to pay for our holiday and realising what a dent it's made in the account! One of the worst things about taking a holiday when you're self-employed is that not only does it cost you money but you don't get paid while you're away :( Double-whammy :(

We used the credit card a lot while we were away just so we didn't have to carry large amounts of cash - we didn't go much over budget - I was roughly estimating $100 / day and it cost us around $120 / day. However it's been too easy to just keep on using the card since we got back, and I'm sure we've bought things we could've done without, just because we "put it on the card".

Add to that the uncertainty of Pete's work atm - they've offered voluntary redundancies with a chance of forced redundancies after that - and it's time to take the head out of the sand, buckle down, use lots of cliches and stop spending! I'll be trying to spend only on essentials until the end of January (hopefully longer).

I'll be using twitter to log how I'm going - I'm not really sure how you "follow" me using twitter, but you can see it on the right on my blog.

2 comments:

belinda said...

Congratulations,

I certainly know where you are coming from on this one.

Dec 26-Jan 1st is the time I have decided to set aside to redo my budget and regain financial focus. All the Christmas spending has been done and we are in less debt than this time last year but even so my account balance at the end of this month was bad, bad, bad.

I don't want to face the numbers just yet which is why I am giving myself Christmas to New Year to get it all worked out. It is not urgent but certainly is essential to ensure that our money is working toward our priorities rather than slipping away on the unimportant.

Kind Regards
Belinda

Lela said...

Well done for you. I'm in a similar situation and although I've tried to keep a handle on christmas I've overspent on several occasions....and we have still got several days to go. As my husband is self-employed I find it hard and stressful in that his income is all over the place.
Good luck,
Lela