Shoestring budget

How do we get to the place where we spend every bit of income we earn (and, in some cases, more than we earn)? While we were re-evaluating our lifestyle, I was reminded of the contrast with our finances in the beginning. In the early days of marriage, when we were living on 2LT pay, and trying to make up for a few bad decisions, we lived on an amazingly small amount of monthly income.

Let’s just put it into perspective: When we were starting out, my husband’s gross monthly income was $1088.80, plus $280.70 housing allowance. After taxation, I’m thinking we ended up with around $1100/month. From that, we paid $350/month rent, utilities, $250/month car payment (yes, my husband did not ascribe to my views on paying cash for cars yet), $75/month car insurance, food, and $90/month for furniture (my sweet husband picked out furniture to surprise me — you can guess how pleased I was).

From the above figures, you can see that we had $765/month already accounted for in fixed costs before utilities, food, gasoline, etc. It didn’t take me long to figure out that we were going to run out of cash waaay before we ran out of month.

So… I made all our food from scratch, watched the sales and did pretty well on our food budget. I had a bicycle that I used for transportation in the near area. No shopping trips for me, no eating out.

It still wasn’t working.

My idea was that I should find work. I immediately tried to find office work in the area, but had no luck. The local businesses had no interest in hiring a transient such as myself and had no pity for me since my husband was employed. My idea of finding work as a waitress was nixed by my husband (who didn’t think it was a fitting occupation for an “officer’s wife”, haha).

Upon looking at our monthly bills as our savings dwindled, I settled upon the utility bill as something we could reduce. I found the electric bill to be much higher than I recalled from college years. I began turning off the heat or A/C during the day and noticed a huge difference. This worked so well, I also turned off the hot water heater and only turned it on to heat up water before evening showers (trust me, it did save electricity).

Just the difference in utilities made all the difference for us. We were able to pay all our bills each month without dipping into our savings and still had about $40* left over for “fun money” each month.

Using this same train of thought may make the difference for folks trying to figure out how to get by on less or how to make it possible to save up a nest egg. It also illustrates how much an impact on monthly expenses reducing your utility costs can make. I won’t say there weren’t a few hot, humid days that I didn’t long for air-conditioning, but we made it!

*I was pretty gullible back in those days. My husband somehow convinced me that we should spend that $40 on an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet (total cost $12) and the rest on video games. He told me that he needed to play those games in order to develop sufficient hand/eye coordination that he wouldn’t die while learning to fly helicopters. If I hadn’t acquiesced, imagine the guilt I’d have felt if he had crashed.