Nerd or Free Spirit?

So here we are, already into the 3rd week. We don't have $1000 put away yet, but we are working on it. As a matter of fact we put together a workable budget for this next month and included a big chunk of it to go to our emergency fund. I know we posted our quickie budget previously, but that left a lot of people confused. I had more people come up to give me a hard time about the money we spent on entertainment. That heading actually included a few other miscellaneous things, so we don't really go that hog wild each month. I'll leave that up there for now as a record of where we started in all this.

So the question came up this week - are you a Nerd or Free Spirit? I'll bet you think you have Jessica and I all figured out if you know us. Jessica is the wild and crazy one who rarely turns down a dare and longs for the day when we will finally buy a Harley (not until all the kids graduate in case you were wondering). I am the "accountant" who once worked in a church and now work for the finance & analysis department of one of Texas's largest quick serve restaurant chains.

I bet you're thinking that Jess is the free spirit and I am the nerd. In almost every other situation you would be correct - but for some reason when it comes to money we switch hats. She is the nerd who has to build the spreadsheet - which takes her hours by the way because she refuses to learn how to do it in excel. She does the whole thing manually in microsoft word. Our budget committee meeting took a really really long time.

I am the free spirit. Most of the time she will put together a budget and I will bash it because I don't think it's right and I have my shiny degree to back me up. I mean, I don't tell her how to deliver babies, right? My problem is that when it comes to money, I plan the best case scenario because under my superior leadership we should be able to achieve the best case. (At least I think it is my problem. You'll probably have to check the posted comments to see what Jess thinks- and yes, Jess, that is an invitation).

And then something goes wrong and we don't. Usually that something going wrong starts out with one of us saying, "I only left the room for a second and then Jordan _____". You can fill in the blank. I know I have used that joke a lot lately, but I really have been saying that phrase pretty often. By the way, Jordan is our 4-year-old going on 21. He is a giant for his age and for most of his life his bumps have had bumps.

My initial reaction is usually to blame her, but most of the time it is not her fault, it is just life that gets in the way. If we had our emergency fund fully funded, 9 times out of 10 we probably could have avoided all of this mess. But we are not there yet.

So we finally had our budget committee meeting and came up with a workable budget. The nerd prepared it, the free spirit modified it, and we both agreed on it. I am going to track what we budgeted in my next post and then at the end of the month I will show you what we actually spent.

If you haven't checked out the online materials that come with the course, now is a great time. There is a program called the "Gazelle Budget" that even my microsoft word loving spouse decided to try. And she loved it.

That's all for now.

Chris