Hello old friend

Okay, so I've been TOTALLY slacking at this, but in my defense I did have a baby in April. Truth is I've just been busy organizing around the house in prep for bringing baby home and adjusting to life with 2 kids, and I've let this slide. But I"M BACK, and I'm hoping to take this to the level that I originally intended - sharing my ideas/tips, what I do to keep my house/life organized. Or as organized as our chaotic lives can be :)

So far I have focused on the financial organizing that I do. I continue to do that and will update from time to time as I adjust what I do to work for me and my family and share it in hopes that it inspires you or helps in some way. I also like to get ideas from others on what they do. That's how we learn best - from each other.

I've recently decided to make an adjustment to our budget. Here's some background to explain why.

For the budget I encourage everyone to have goals to work towards. Well, we have several that we work on at the same time. We are working towards paying off student loans and our mortgage early. We are also working towards early retirement and building a 6 month emergency fund.

As you can imagine this eats up a lot of our budget and leaves little wiggle room. We are fine with the limited cash we get per week because we know we are working towards things that are important to us; however our last goal is not being met. Just as we put money in we are pulling some out to cover expenses such as the fridge repair man, car repairs, home repairs or improvements etc.

This has led me to alter our plan. See, I'm an instant gratification kinda person so I kept thinking the more I put in the emergency fund the faster we would get the 6 months saved up. True - but it wasn't working, we need a little more wiggle room, obviously, or we wouldn't keep dipping into the fund.

So now I'm going to take 10% of what we were saving out and keep it for those expenses that seem to pop up. Hopefully, this will help us reach our goal faster and keep us from dipping :)

I'll let you know how it goes! Any tips or ideas that you use/do?