Baby Steps Progress and Using the Cash System

I keep getting way behind on staying on top of our finances so last weekend I decided I was going to take 10-15 minutes every evening and enter receipts into Quicken. I’ve been sticking to my goal and I’m very glad because we’ve been having some issues with our checking accounts. We have been keeping $1000 in Mr. A’s business account so when he starts a new job he’ll have money to cover materials until the first payment is made. The job he’s on now, between the gasoline costs and materials, he almost overdrew the account. When I looked at it on Wednesday evening I panicked because the available balance was $0.51.

He had a check on hand to cover the materials, but we hadn’t gotten it to the bank yet. So I moved money from our savings into the checking to cover anything else that might come through.

Last weekend, Mr. A promised to make a renewed effort to give me every single receipt. I went to work with Mr. A on Friday and updated this blog on Saturday, so I sat down yesterday afternoon to enter a handful of receipts. I was very pleased to see when I doubled checked the receipts on hand against the bank information, that I did indeed have every receipt. Actually one was missing, but the bank didn’t even have it listed yet. It was for gasoline and Mr. A had the information all written down for me.

I have handled our money for the past few years, and Mr. A has left that completely up to me. But now that he has his own business, it is necessary for him to track the amount of money he’s spending so he’ll know at any given time how much money is available in his account.

We have also decided to try taking cash out of the bank every Thursday for the next week’s groceries. So far of the $250 we took from the account on Thursday, we have spent $181.00. We are following The Saving Dinner plan this week. Last night’s meal was fish tacos. Delicious! I’m pretty excited about using this plan. I went through the shopping list, and we had many of the ingredients on hand. Hamburger and roast was on sale for $1.77 so we did some stocking up. Mr. A also found 1# packages of deli-type lunch meat on clearance for $0.99 so he bought 14 packages of that.

I also completed the half month finances. I paid all the remaining bills, including the ever-worrisome Citicard (which isn’t due until June 4th), made a payment in full for the transmission so that credit card is back down to zero again, and we incurred ZERO interest charges. I’m very pleased about that. I have money left in the bank for groceries, which I’ll pull out next Thursday. I have money left in the bank for gasoline until the end of the month (personal gasoline).

I think I got everything, and I’ll try to stick to my goal in the coming days.

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5 thoughts on “Baby Steps Progress and Using the Cash System

  1. Hah. I spent several hours this weekend getting caught up in Quicken. It’s so easy to do it a little at a time if I could just make myself do it. Every time I sit down to tackle I’m shocked at how long it’s been since I last updated.

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