The Intersection of Creativity and Balancing Your Bottom Line

Over the last few weeks, we've been tweaking our family household budget.  In order to get a better handle on where our money is flowing, I've been trying to keep track of what I'm spending -- where, on what and why.


It has been an eye opener, to say the least.  We spend a lot of money on crap we don't really need.

This is not exactly the thing you want to find out about yourself -- that you have an impulse purchase issue when it comes to items that your child or your husband might want and you are all about making them happy and so you buy before you really even think about it -- but there it is in black and white on receipts, week in and week out. 

And so?  I'm trying to spend my money more wisely and consciously.

Making Our Home Our Castle

One of our goals this year is to get a better handle on our family budget.  As we hurtle toward retirement, being able to live comfortably when we are spending well below our income is a big goal.

Both of us have seen far too many people need to keep working well past when they would rather have retired because their expenses were too great to be able to stop and enjoy their lives.  We've also seen far too many people retire, and then have to find some other part-time employment or something else to cover rising medical or other expenses that weren't planned for earlier.

We're very blessed in that we have the means to live well, because we have both worked very hard to get us to this point and continue to do so.

But that doesn't mean we ought to just take it for granted that will always be the case, or that we shouldn't be more thoughtful about how we use our resources.  Using them more wisely is always a good goal. 

One way to enjoy what we already have more while spending less is to get our home where we want it to be -- comfortable, cozy, inviting, less cluttered -- so that spending time at home is preferable to going out, spending more money and buying crap you don't need.

I've been looking around our house lately with that sort of eye toward what is working for us and what is not.

On The Importance Of Spending Earnestly

I found this quote from Joe Dominguez particularly compelling, and wanted to share it with all of you, discussing saving versus spending at random:

It's investing in the future, your kids' future, your own future, your nation's future rather than glomming on to it all for yourself, right now, and maxing out the credit cards, which is putting a lien on your future, on your kids and the whole system. That's the craziness of today.

I say this knowing that I spent at random this past weekend, and that I've been trying to be more conscious about it. But sometimes? You just slip into the spending mode and you don't even realize it.

At least I do.

And then I have buyer's remorse on the other end of the transaction.  Not because I don't have the money to spend, necessarily, but more because I could have spent that money more wisely elsewhere.

If you want to make a difference, and I do -- I so want to make a difference for someone who needs it -- then oughtn't I be more careful with my pennies so that I can have more to give to folks who need it rather than wasting my pennies on things neither I nor my family really need, and on products that only enrich the people selling them to me and not much else?

Could Less Be More?

We have been talking about ways to bring home the point for The Peanut that to whom much is given, much ought to also be expected.  And that helping others who are less fortunate is a choice we all ought to be making more often.

Now that she is 8, it seems a really good time to find more ways to bring that point home as her perspective on the world and her community widens, and her understanding and empathy begin to broaden a bit beyond "me" and "everyone else."

But how to best do that?

We already donate unused household items -- especially clothes and toys that she has outgrown -- to charity that we have her help to pick out every year.  We put together gift stockings at Christmas each year so that children who don't have toys can get something nice, and she loves helping with that.

And we donate money to local, national and international groups.  But not nearly enough, we feel, as it turns out, as we are reviewing our finances at the end of the tax year.

One of the things that is worrying for us is that, since we had The Peanut later in life when we were both already established professionals, she's been born into a family where she doesn't really want for anything.  That is both a blessing and a curse, as we are constantly struggling with how to make us and her happy without pushing the line over to rampant, thoughtless, rote consumerism without giving thought to what we are buying and why.

More importantly, we want to ask and we want her to ask where the money might perhaps better be used for a much more needed purpose.

Saving For Your Child's College While Balancing Retirement Savings?

At the beginning of every year since the first year we were married, Mr. ReddHedd and I have spent a good deal of time dickering over financial goals for the year, and how we did in the prior year.  And, most importantly, where we want to be financially 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the road.

As we've gotten older, those discussions have taken on more of a panicky tone at times when our day to day spending habits weren't gelling well with our annual goal setting, because we can both hear the retirement clock ticking loudly in the background at this point in our marriage.

The question we are always asking ourselves is whether we are doing enough to save so that we can live without fear or panic in our older age, as we've seen far too many people have to do the last few years.  

But we keep running into the same questions:  How can you plan having no idea what medical expenses are going to be over the long haul?  Especially since we have a 9 year gap in our ages, and thus will have an insurance gap in there somewhere unless real health care reform manages to occur by some minor miracle or I go back to work at a job which has health insurance that will not automatically be a pain for someone with a pre-existing condition, no matter how well she manages it.  Not a given.

Also, how can we know what our living expenses really will be, even using worst case scenario increases in utility costs, etc., for planning purposes?

How can we possibly know what The Peanut's college needs are going to be, given that she is 7 years old at the moment and has future goals that range from "being a scientist" to "being a member of the Scooby gang?"  How do your reconcile all of this with wanting to actually live and have fun in the now but not spending so much that you are jeopardizing saving for the future?

None of these are easy questions with ready answers.