Dave Ramsey Money Envelopes Collage Style

Do you follow the The Total Money Makeoverby Dave Ramsey? We have for over three years and one of things I love to hate about it is the all cash system. It's THE BEST way to save money. Seriously. The Best! But keeping all those categories straight in those crappy envelopes drove me nuts. So last year I started altering Dave's envelope refills to better meet my needs. I get so many compliments on them whenever I'm paying for things that I thought I'd make a couple extra this time in case any of you would like a set.

Each one starts with a thick piece of cardboard that I cover in a piece of hand painted paper.

Then I trim it to size and Mod Podge it onto both sides of the cardboard. Then it sits out to dry overnight.

 

Then I goof off and play around with the cover until it's just right, in this case I used a print of one of my collages and added a quote.

"Dreams are necessary to life" seemed appropriate for a budget system.

 

 Inside of the front cover:

There are SIX category envelopes for things like groceries, eating  out, gas etc. and then a sturdy zipper pouch which I treat as a seventh category but friends use for coins and coupons.

And behind that is four pages for writing in your purchases. I always rip them out and use the plastic pouch as my back cover. It's nice and sturdy.

Hope you all liked this project. 

I have several more to share over the next few days. 

Available in my shop

Blog Award

My sweet friend, Glittery Katie, a fellow Bombshell gave me this sweet blog award. I know there have been a few others (Carmen, Gabby, I'm sorry) but with all the surgery/meds/pain whoo-ha I've been bad about keeping up with things. That said, I really, really appreciated them and felt a little thrill at being mentioned. Thank you.

The way this works is:

1. Copy and paste the award on your blog.
2. List who gave the award to you and use a link to her blog (or hyperlink).
3. List 10 things that make you happy.
4. Pass the award on to other bloggers and visit their blog to let them know!
5. I am not such a stickler for rules if you are like me: do as you please with it!!!

I'd like to give this award to Cheryl - one of the most talented card makers I've ever had the privilege of knowing and an absolute sweetheart as well.

And to Maggi, I really can't say enough wonderful things about the positive, creative force that is uniquely Maggi. She's the real deal.

10 things that make me happy!

1. Coffee
2. Bombshell Stamps and Pin-up culture in general
3. Gauche Alchemy and the fact that I can be vintage and eclectic in my crafts without shopping. Yahoo. And my Gauche Girls.
4. Stripy Socks!
5. My friends in Portland. Who I love with all my heart. You know who you are.
6. Mountains. Snow. Mountains with Snow. Being snowed in up the mountain
7. Jason, Estela and Benjamin.
8. Being a boy mom, which means life is filed with zombies and dragons, not Barbie and ballerinas.
9. Bubby. The very, very best dog in all the land
10. Being married to a guy who still rocks my world and takes my breath away each and every day.

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We are still working on our March-April budget and it is seriously kicking our butt. Squeeze as hard as I can and I can't get our spending below 70% of our income. Grrr. This month we have no health spending account to fall back on, so prescriptions, doctors co-pays etc. are all cash categories. We also have a Costco membership due and last month we ate the cupboards bare (on purpose for the sake of freshness) so groceries are going to be spendy. This should be an interesting month money-wise.

I share this, because I sometimes worry that I haven't put a wholly honest spin on the TMMO - debt reduction journey. It hasn't all been a happy scamper from spendthrift to miser. Thousand dollar bills haven't fallen from the sky (although it was nice to sign the check from the tax man as opposed to writing him one) and we've worked hard every day. This week alone we've spent at least two hours a night scouring our bills and budget trying to decide if a category with twenty dollars in it can be moved down to fifteen. It's a lot of work and sacrifice. We're just Go Hard or Go Home people so we've made crazy progress.

Money and Health

Thought on this glorious payday I would give you an update on the budget.

We are still dropping between 40% and 60% of our income on debt. We've also sold a lot of extraneous household goods and popped every blissful surprise windfall onto our bills. What have those rolls of dimes, seven dollar eBay sales and a diet of rice and beans, bean and rice, lentils and rice, lentils and potatoes... (you get the picture) accomplished?

We've reduced out debt by 25,000 dollars since July!

********************** SQUEAL!!!!!! ****************************

Our Credit card hasn't been used since July 27th and amazingly a person can live without one.

For Christmas we put our Christmas money in an envelope and stopped spending when the envelope was empty. Easy as 1,2,3. Or was it? To be honest, it wasn't. Chris doesn't like gifts under a hundred bucks (we'll, maybe a Mighty Mouse) and there wasn't room for such things. But I shopped creatively and I think everyone will be pleased.

We manage online shopping by keeping a deposit envelope in the car. Whenever we buy online we drop the cash in the envelope and deposit it in the bank when we're doing errands. So far it's been virtually fool-proof.

Change is another positive area. We throw it in my piggy bank calaca and roll it at the end of each month. That money further reduces our debt.

I can't fully articulate how excited we are to be making such a huge dent in our debt. To have gone from spending approximately 110% of each check to about 50% has been a big lifestyle change, but it's one we feel really good about.

Sorry for the internet silence this past week. Something went wrong in my tailbone. As far as I can tell, it may have crumbled or broken an additional time from the trauma of the injection. I'm receiving a lot of medical care but all they can do is make things bearable until surgery. I see my doc on Monday and the surgeon on Wednesday. Hopefully I'll be recovering early in the new year. Since life is rather bleak right now, I've decided to have less of an online presence until I can report happy things. Like say....

$25,000 DOLLARS!!!

Warm, Soft and Handmade

As you've all heard, ad nauseam, we're on a fierce budget trying to take down our mountain of debt before we get clobbered by spinal surgery bills. It's going well, in fact this month we've budgeted 40.3 % of our income to debt reduction - which is major.

You can't throw that sort of money at a problem without squeezing other areas of your life pretty dry. I needed a scarf, but our clothing budget is routinely chewed and swallowed whole by boy shoes and boy jeans. Those children grow each and every month - it's nutty. At first I went to Micheal's and picked up some yarn on sale with plans to (knifty) knit it into a scarf. $7.48 isn't much of an expense, right. Good one. Well, no.

I looked through our scrap bag and saw a lot of wonderful, soft t shirts and promptly returned the wool. Instead I made a totally awesome, very "me" Pearl Jam themed scarf. Both sides are equally finished so it can be a gray and black striped scarf if Pearl Jam isn't appropriate for the setting. I even put a lot more stripes on the plain side for interest.



Pretty neat, huh? And Chris's holey Pearl Jam shirt and a Google swag give away have new life.

Tips from the project:

* I cut my pieces about 8 inches wide. It is a nice width but if you like your scarves skinnier or wider go for it.

* The length is roughly 68 inches.

* By mistake I cut a piece 7 inches wide - OOPS - and then didn't have enough material to finish the scarf. Since old t shirts are all faded differently I couldn't find a match. Instead I used the sleeves, cutting each into a ring that worked beautifully as stripes. I had no idea that sleeves don't have pesky seams to work around.

* Once I had sewed it all together and turned it right side out, I topstitched around it again about 5mm in from the edges. It gives the scarf a very finished look.

* I used white thread on top and black in the bobbin. The adds to the reversible feel as even the stitching is different on each side.

Hope you like my scarf and maybe you'll be inspired to make one of your own. It's a great use for classic but battered shirts.

Hello Winter

Hey Everyone,

Sorry for the eight day break. Yikes. Managing chronic pain can really take a chunk out of your day.

Since we talked last we've had a big snowy blizzard. The boys were ecstatic!

I'm blogging the intro to my four part series about Day of the Dead HERE. Check it out :-) I know I've mentioned it before but in case you missed it, I blog at Gauche Alchemy on Mondays and Fridays so if you're missing me *grin* you can scamper over there.

What's new... we're paying our mortgage again. Bah humbug! That two month break was awesome and we scrimped, sold and squeezed hard enough that our three years of remaining car payments will disappear mid-month. THAT"S IN TWO WEEKS!!!!! YES, I'M YELLING - WITH JOY!!!! It's insane to comprehend that we paid off twelve thousand dollars in debt in two months. Especially when three months ago we were going from paycheck to paycheck plus wracking up the visa.

*Happy Dance*

Some little tricks:

1. No one needs free access to milk etc. Seriously. We buy a reasonable amount for the week and when it's gone, it's gone. Our grandmother's didn't let their kids stand at the fridge drinking milk every time they're thirsty and neither do I. Nutritionally, a glass or two plus water the rest of the day is just fine.

2. Coffee. I always made a full pot and threw out a half to a third of it at night. Now I make a half pot and about once a week make a second half pot. We are using half as much coffee and I'm drinking just as much. That is close to $20 a month in savings.

3. When you run out of something, if you are also out of money then you just have to go without. How did we not know this before? I think us children of the 80s missed that memo and our debt loads reflect that oversight. I ran out of rice this week after two failed attempts. So we're not having curried lentils on rice or cabbage rolls until payday on Monday. Such is life. Will we die without curried lentils for five days? Probably not.

4. When you run out of money, stay home. Obvious right? Not hardly. When you leave the house there are so many temptations - Starbucks, groceries, card stock. Even a drive burns gas. Gas costs money. At the end of the month, go for a walk, play a board game, watch one of the dozen DVDs you own.

5. The library is an amazing resource. I go online and reserve all movies, books etc. I want and then every Saturday morning we go and make an event of hanging out at the library. Because we go every Saturday morning we never have to worry about late fees or making special trips to drop off overdue books. We also have a shelf dedicated to library books/movies so they don't end up all over the house. Once the book is read, we move it to the tote for easy returns.

Healthy (Ha!), Wealthy and Wise

Thought it was about time to do another update. So... I'd love to cry in my beer but I signed a contract with the pain folks that excludes beer for the foreseeable future. I'd cry into a bowl of pudding but I'm vegan. I guess I need to put on my happy face and keep going.

Had my pain clinic appointment and was terrified as I was under the impression that I'd be getting my spinal injection. Nope I got two hours of talking instead. And a whole new treatment plan.

Turns out my back is trashed - to put in mildly. MRIs are wonderful things. If I ever need to take a friendly witness into court I'm bringing an MRI machine. No kidding. Tell someone you have pain and they give you that, 20 pounds overweight housewife... bored? Needs attention? look. Show them a seriously icky MRI and you're as legit as Snoop Dogg's claim of being OG.

According to my doc I must have had a very full childhood replete with sledding accidents, falls from horses, bike wrecks, car wrecks, tubing mishaps. To that I said, " Heck, Ya!" And he replied, " And now you're paying for it." I guess it doesn't take a CSI expert to piece together a misspent youth :-)

The skinny - L5S1: desiccated disc (hard and flat, not wet and puffy), retrolisthesis (posterior facing herniated disc), broad based posterior disc bulge, left paracentral annular tear, degenerative disc disease, compression on the left S1 root

All that explains the type of pain and numbness I'm feeling so we are postponing any fiddling with the tailbone and SI joint for the next six months and are focusing on the new list of issues. Apparently my degenerative bone disease is the least of my problems. Ditto for the broken, unattached, goofy tailbone.

I am getting a root nerve block on Wednesday and am officially being prescribed buckets of narcotics. I've been taking - for the most part - Advil and the occasional Vicodan and the doc says that is why my world is getting pretty small. He thinks taking an appropriate mix of pain meds and being able to hike, volunteer, attend church etc. is a lot better than stoically not being able to leave the house but being "drug-free" I have mixed feelings about this.

I'm also in a registry and have agreed to all sorts of crazy things which are part of a "pain program" for example, they can call me at anytime and I have 24 hours to come to the clinic and have my pills counted. If it's 15 days since refill I better have half left. Also, (and I thought this was only in the Stepford Wives movie) to "better help their patients" all the toilets in the clinic are rigged with a drug testing apparatus so whenever you pee you are providing a sample. Weird. I don't know how people abuse prescriptions - this process has been very intense. Did you know whenever I get a refill it takes 24 hours because they run a police search on all state pharmacies to make sure I haven't filled any other prescriptions? Crazy!

So that's healthy in a nutshell. I'm a little freaked out, but I'm managing. I have a lot of years left (36 isn't very old) and my back needs to carry me through them. I hate to ponder how it's going to be when I'm 70.

Wealthy: We're about 50 days into our budget and it's going smashingly. I ran a little over in groceries so I borrowed from hair care and clothes - all "legal" moves in our plan. We've become a magnet for money. I wonder if we always were and just never knew it. There is a pretty constant flow of rebates, overcharges, sales, refunds etc. and they are adding up big time. We hope to have our car paid off by mid-October and then we'll get to work on the Visa bill. We are still living on 38% of our income which is super-awesome. Next month we'll have to pay our mortgage again which should bring down our debt payment a bit. Still, our drafted budget for next month shows us paying 40% to debts and living on the other 60% which is still impressive (to me at least) and is a far cry from the 110% we were living on three months ago.

Wise: Nope. Not wise at all. Although, with my new position at Gauche Alchemy I have been writing a lot more consistently and I love to be using my skills again. So it's not a total wash.

I bet all my crafting readers are bored stiff right now. Sorry, but you guys are the target for most of my post and this one is for my near and dear. Just so it's not a total waste *grin* Here are some Halloween tags I've been working on featuring my beloved Retro Cowgirls set from Bombshell Stamps:



And this is a LO I did for SassyGirlScraps last week:



And last but not least, Welcome Willows, thanks for popping by :-)

Last Day of the Budget & Glitter Paint

Whew. We've been on our budget six weeks and are at the last day of our first month of going whole hog with envelopes, coin rolling - THE WORKS.

First, let me explain something probably more for the sake of my pride than your assumptions. We are getting our financial house in order because we have an 8th grader and university suddenly seems a lot closer. Three kids in college at the same time is going to be spendy. Back surgery might be in my future and it'll cost big bucks too. We looked at expenses like car payments and said to ourselves, Yes, by American standards we're fine. But do we want to be paying off the car and the visa bills when we're also putting kids through school? The answer was obviously "no". We also want to travel before the kids leave home. If it's going to be more than a pipe dream, we need to start socking money away under the mattress. I've noticed most people don't fuss with their finances until they are in trouble. We are choosing to see a bump a ways down the road and get the shocks fixed before we hit it.

So, about that budget. We ended up putting 66% of our money on debt this month and when I rifled through the envelopes there was $71.50 in unspent cash and an additional $125.00 in categories we'd left untouched in the bank. Tonight I'm going to be grinning like a pig in poop when we deposit that $196.50. We did good.


Has it been easy? Yes and No. Of course spending next to nothing, eating all our meals at home and those meals being heavy on beans and rice has been a lot of additional work during a season in my life where if anything I need less work. But, having our finances in order is a big relief.

Once we have to pay our mortgage again we'll not be able to live on so little. Still, we're aiming for 40% on debt each month. I'll keep you posted.

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My head is clearing up as I'm adjusting to more pain and a lot more meds. I hope to be scrapping and crafting again in the next few days too.

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I'm a Bombshell Girl for another term. Yippee! Thanks, Shannon for having faith in me and keeping me around. You can see all the designers here. Congrats, ladies.

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We've been doing different things for our dates lately and I've been begging Chris to do an art project with me. He's a little art-phobic even though he has mad drawing skills and rocks at pretty much everything. We needed more shelf space and decided to see what we could build. Scrounging in the basement yielded these:


So we did this:


We used glitter paint (yeah, we're madcap like that) so if you shine a light on it it looks like this:


But in reality, since it's facing a hallway and no windows, it really looks like this:



I'm mostly happy with it. The only boo-hooing I'm doing is that I used up all my best scrapbook trims on the shelves. But think of how much I'll get to enjoy them. We'll replace the black suede fringe at the top with red suede fringe if I ever get to leave the house again *grumble, stupid back, grumble*. Funky, no?

There is a small chance I'm going to bling it out Gauche Alchemy style like this:



But I wanted to see how the trim holds up to boy use before adding more. If you noticed though, there's a bottle cap on there already; it's seducing me with sweet whispers of possibility.

Thanks for bearing with me this month. Love to you all.

The 2:00 AM Blogger

Sorry for the lack of posts this past week. I knew waiting thirty days until I start treatment for my back problems was going to be tough, but I had not anticipated also taking a turn for the worse during this time. Surprise! (Note my dripping sarcasm.)

That said, I have some blessings to count:

1. I'm not near as freaked about the spinal injections. Frankly if someone said they 'd like to administer pain relief via a sharp spike through my eyeball, I think I'd be tempted. Plus, I called the physician and learned they use fluoroscopy which is much more exact in it's placement and subsequently a lot more effective. Effective is good.

2. We're getting a boatload of homeschooling done. Making sure the kids get some measure of structure is important to me and by afternoon I'm usually knackered so we are having really awesome homeschool mornings. We're accomplishing a great deal of targeted learning and I was able to get next year's plans more or less hammered out. We're one teeny-weeny lesson away from finishing the last straggling bits of the 2008-2009 school year and then we'll have completed every single thing we set out to do. Woo-hoo. My goal was to be done by September so we came in right on target.

3. This month we put 63% of our income on debt and lived off the other 37%. We've got six days left in our fiscal month and the envelopes still have a few bucks left in them, the cupboards are full, kids have shoes, I bought some glorious white-wash Core'dinations cardstock and Chris has gone out for lunch a handful of times. A budget is pretty much the coolest tool ever. It was so neat to need stuff for school and to have money already waiting in that category. Ditto for the aforementioned shoes etc. In a time that is so mentally taxing, it is an enormous relief to not have to think too hard about money too.

A nice side product of our new financial plan is that gifts mean so much more. When Chris comes home with something special for me (like vanilla soy creamer for my coffee) I know that the two bucks really effected his bottom line and came out of his personal spending money. It's very sweet. And the boys are enjoying how much more time we are spending together now that we are staying home and enjoying the wonderful things we already have instead of chasing after new thrills.

As soon as I'm crafting again - and can think clearly - I'll be back to my old self and blogging like a fiend. Right now, I don't even have the attention span to read the back cover blurb on a paper back, the pain is just too all-encompassing.

Wishing you all lots and lots of love. Please forgive my silences and occasional surliness. I'm doing the best I can and even that is a small, small thing compared to what I'm used to.

Health Update Plus a Little Wealth

The internet is a funny thing. What to share, what to keep to yourself. What news to break to friends over your blog and what deserves a phone call. For me, things that will impact others, like " we're moving" are best done personally but things that only impact me can get a pass if I share like this. How do you decide?

Yesterday was my big day at the pain clinic. It was a lot different than what I expected. Among other things, it wasn't until an hour in that I realized the young guy I was talking too was the PA, not the nurse and so I didn't go out of my way to impress him. Oh well. That was good too. ( I wasn't being classist, just nurses have a job to do and I didn't want to get in his way. Doctors tend to want to hear the whole story, nurses want a note to add to your chart. Plus, when someone comes in and takes your blood pressure...) On a superficial note, I didn't fit in there at all. Everyone seemed so (excuse my frankness here) pathetic. Unwashed hair, empty eyes, no pride in themselves - seriously broken people. The worst part was on the surface they didn't seem to be physically that bad, just really beat down by it. I made the effort to look my best and I'm pretty sure I surprised them when they assessed how bad things really are. I guess Billy Crystal's "it's not how you feel, it's how you look and you look mahvelous" made a big impression on me as a kid :-)



All chit-chat aside, here's the skinny:

* The scroiliitis is not what is causing all the trouble. It is causing a lot of trouble. Also, my old doc was a huge idiot (this is almost a direct quote). According to these guys, they've never seen SI put someone in a wheelchair and I should, "wipe that from my mind" as "it's not going to happen". Since we've been on a countdown for the last five years and each degeneration was met with, "maybe this is it", hearing there is no it was rad.

* My broken tailbone circa '96 is either still broken or has healed really, really bad. Like crazy bad. And it's causing a boatload of hurt to my already diseased spine.

* I have two or three herniated discs in my lower back - you guessed it, near my tailbone and sacrum. Talk a bout a triple threat.

The plan is to start with epidurals. They'll inject lidocaine and steroids into my spine (for the SI) or my coccyx and see how I do. I might do awesome. I'm *super* excited about big needles in my spine. I watched Incredible Hulk and Blonski - who's a real bad ass - screamed in pain. How on earth will I do? Funny aside, PA says to me, "You've had three kids, you know what an epidural feels like." I said, " Nope. Had mine natural as I couldn't bear the thought of putting narcotics in my babies itty-bitty blood streams" He writes something on my chart. Smiles. " I just wrote we don't need to worry about you and pain meds."

If that fails, we're going to discuss a tailbone-ectomy. Who knew you can cut the silly thing off without too much fuss? Back surgery is always a lot of fuss, but you don't need a tailbone. And since mine is a real brat, this might be the direction we take.

So, right now I'm in the 30 day hold portion of the plan. You have to wait 30 days for treatment while drug tests go through and they gather up MRIs and such. Which means in Nicole terms, 30 days of huge agony before they start making me better. At least now I can put big X's on the calendar. I had my MRI done yesterday so now we wait.

Wealthy:

We did the books this morning as it's payday and I nearly fell over to see we have put 61.4% of our income on debt this month. That means we're living on 38.6% - we never managed to make it on 100% of our income before. Yippee. And this month has had a lot of dumb stuff. My first grocery budget ever and on day three we ran out of flour, ketchup, mayonnaise (vegan of course), worchesterchire... all the staples you "never" have to buy. It certainly hasn't been a case of living off of full cupboards and a stocked freezer. We've even had fun! Go figure :-)

Thanks for all your prayers. There is some rough water ahead for me but at least I'm not looking at ending up in a wheelchair anymore. That's pretty awesome.

Julie & Julia, Money and Cards

We went to Julie and Julie last night. The first 3/4 was terrific, very enjoyable, and Meryl Streep really stole the show. But we had to leave because my pain went way beyond what I could manage. It was a 'skin of my teeth' sort of night with hourly debates about whether a trip to the ER was due. I'm very pleased to report that we made it through and this morning things are significantly better. Still bad but not go-to-the-hospital level.

As most of you have read, we are doing the Total Money Makeover and working hard to take down our debt. Through some Herculean stone squeezing we've managed to drop 57% of our income on debt this month. Who knew we could spend less, eat cheaper, drive less, cancel or sell anything within reach and make some significant, lightening-fast improvements to our financial bottom line.

Yesterday I sold gold. I know... who knew? Turns out gold is very expensive right now so I looked into my options like "gold for cash" mail-in deals ~ CAN YOU SAY SCAM! But, a local company, in business 50 years, appraises and then pays cash so we went there. I had a baggie of broken chains and bent, single earrings. A very small bag. We were hoping for about forty bucks as broken closet clutter didn't seem worth anything but I certainly wasn't going to throw it away. Our experience was awesome. An appraiser sorted it all, explained how the jewelry business works, scratch tested the gold (SO COOL) and then offered us $205. That's huge! We took it, happily, to the bank and deposited it in our account and then rushed home to cut a check to the car company. Yippee. That trip to the mall netted us half a car payment.

CAD #14