By Nicole

Does everything take longer after you have kids?  Well, I guess I should have enough kids by now to know that the answer is yes.  Yet sometimes I still fall back into the habit of underestimating how long things really will take. Case in point.  I put off grocery shopping this weekend until I could drive into town (the "town" where we shop at Costco, WalMart, Safeway, etc. is an hour away) when it was still mostly light out and the roads wouldn't be totally icy.  Sunday afternoon was really my only time.  When I started out the morning trying to get ready ahead of time for church and still walking in late, I should have known... We finally got home from church ( I had to stay late to tape labels on my Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes that I had procrastinated on) and settled in the car to drive to town at 2:15ish.  We didn't make it to Costco until  almost 4 because I had to stop at the bank and check the oil.  The car was dry (I driv...

So, about two and a half years ago, a dear friend of mine, who also happens to be a financial guru in my opinion, got me onto the envelope budget and accompanying debt repayment calculation Excel spreadsheet. Jason and I had been essentially living from paycheck to paycheck with good intentions of getting everything paid off, but we still spent every two weeks looking at each other and wondering where all our "extra" money went. Yeah - he would work his butt off doing all the overtime possible... just to hear me say that we didn't have any money. Somehow we were throwing it all away... We jumped into a new life of budgeting... every pay period I would faithfully enter in our payments, check credit card balances, and fill our hand labeled envelopes with the cash we were allowed to spend on groceries and miscellaneous. Let me tell you - the envelopes didn't have to be very big. We faithfully put money into savings every paycheck. I even began to tithe like I was suppose...