The Family Budget

I have many things I wish to write about here but I guess I will just share with you a little of me.

I am a wife, a mother of three, a qualified pastry chef, and a women in my own right.
I have thoughts, beliefs and opinions, so here I am going to share them with you On just every day things weather it is something that happened to me that day or something from the news.
I will share with you parts of my journeys I am on, and things I am doing.

So now that that is out of the way, the major journey I am partaking in which I am sure many families in Australia are going through right now, is one to semi financial freedom. Now when I say semi I meant that as a one income family I know that we will be paying off our mortgage for a long time yet.

Now my husband quiet often says to me when I try to talk about money issues with him is that " If we had a million dollars in the bank, you would still want more! "
Know just to clarify, all I want is to live comfortably and be able to pay the bills as they come in and buy the things we need and some that we want without too much stress.
Is that too much to ask for ?

After nearly loosing our car to the bank we decided that we needed to re asses the way we handle our money. We sort the help of a local financial councilor to help us get things in control, and what we found was that our out goings where far more than our in comings.
(no wonder we could never get ahead!)
So now our challenge is to see if we can trim that down so we are living well within our means again. So to do this we have to keep track of everything we spend, and only spend what we have budgeted for. For instance if we have only budgeted for $70 for petrol that's all we spend on petrol and if we don't need to spend that much we keep it aside for when we need to spend more then $70 on Petrol.
The other thing that we were unaware of was exactly how much we spent on groceries. this means every trip to the corner store for more milk and bread, or down to the supermarket 'cause we feel like something extra special for dinner.
So now we have set ourselves a budget of $180 a week for all things groceries and while both hubby and I think this might be too much ( not forgetting we are a family of five) I am scared that I can't make this work. Now I know that is a stupid thought because we have to make it work, But I can't help but think 'what if I stuff this up?' silly I know, and as a result I have been putting off doing the groceries shopping this week!

So I am going to set myself some challenges to accomplish this week

• Write out a menu for the next week until payday, and do the shopping, and stay within the budget.

• Shop around for a better deal on the electricity.

• Buy a bike (cheaply of cause ).

I hope you enjoy my blog and I hope to hear your thoughts.

I just want to leave you with something to ponder.

Why is it we never learnt anything about our private finances at school? and I don't know about the rest of you but growing up we never talked about the family budget or money of any sort really ( this is something I plan to change in my family.) So its no wounder people like you and me fall into debt faster than we realize.

So thats it for now I guess. I hope to see you again soon.

Beth.