In which we start to tackle monetary issues (part one of 8 zillion)

For all of our unmistakably brilliant marriage the amazing Mr. W. has handled our finances, recently however it has started to make him feel tense in a way that scares small children and animals so he handed the chore over to me.   To my mind this is, of course, an excellent move, in part because I am not stressed about these things and in part because I could use a new project and I actually have the time to devote one, especially if it results in a better life for us.

While we’ve never been wealthy (to my mind) it is true that, particularly when we were both working, we have generally had a fair amount of cash to ‘play’ with.   For example we don’t worry about spending money eating out or worry much about buying new toys.  I buy the best food for us (and for the pets) and we travel regularly.  It would be incorrect to say we don’t think about these things, we do, but they are not out of reach for us and they definitely ratchet up our expenses. 

Now I’m trying to come up with some strategies for reducing our expenses that will help bring them down without bringing us down.  First off I immediately moved our records into the Mac version of Quicken, this allows me to track what we actually spend our money on.  I needed two months of “normal” data to get a feeling for our spending habits.  My plan is to slowly bring down our expenditure by a bit a month.  Now I’m trying to find ways to help us achieve the reductions.

My most recent idea is that we get a star for any day we don’t spend money and for a day when we both don’t spend money we get a gold star.   The question is what do our stars MEAN at the end?  I doubt it will be enough just to get a star, after all I have a whole box of them and can give them all to myself.  No, it should equal something in the Real World.  One of the things that we spend money on is media.  I’m thinking that who ever has the most stars at the end of the month gets an extra 25.00 towards entertainment/media since that is one of our most severely budgeted areas. I’m at a slight disadvantage in this since I do most of the grocery shopping and errands but since Mr. W. normally eats out when he travels I figure that will even out over a whole month.   

 I also think we should get something jointly for days when neither of us spend any money.  Like we get to put 50.00 into a travel fund for every five days we don’t spend.   Or something like this

Of course you, dear perspicacious reader can the flaw in this plan!  It doesn’t actually reward spending less; it just rewards doing the spending on fewer days.  True my friend, too true.  What I’m hoping is that if we try to condense our spending to fewer days that we will spend less impulsively (since it will take more planning), and that we will use somewhat less fuel (since errands will be combined). 

I will let you know how it works.