working on our finances

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but when we travel, we tend to listen to a lot of podcasts. And one that we’ve really taken a liking to is Dave Ramsey’s podcast. (My husband bought his book several years ago and got out of debt before we got married, and I’ve since gotten out of debt. Since our marriage, we’ve managed to build a pretty decent emergency fund.) On our (first?) trip to Lake Waccamaw this summer, Dave mentioned another book, which Kenny ended up buying a little more than a week ago. He’s about halfway through the book, and last week he mentioned that he thought we should talk about our finances. I agreed, and we decided Sundays would be great days for us to schedule time to talk about money. Except for this week, I agreed to “meet” on Thursday since we’re going to be traveling.

I don’t recall being very excited about meeting on Thursday. I had a long work day, followed by a Rotary meeting, and I was exhausted when I got home. After dinner, though, Kenny said, “Are you ready to talk about finances?” I think I whined and sat back down. He then reached in the chair next to him and pulled out forms. He’d had them hidden all through dinner. He handed me the first form with our net worth and I immediately laughed. Across the top, it said “Our Last Name, Inc.” (Except insert our real last name.) Um, so we’re incorporated now?

We made daily, weekly, monthly, annual and lifetime goals for our finances. One of his daily goals is to stop buying the single sodas at gas stations/stores. One of my goals is to only go to Target once.

To which my husband replied, “HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU GO TO TARGET?” I said, “this week?” (Between me and the entire blogging community, I went to Target every day last week during my lunch hour. I didn’t buy stuff every day, but I did go….to be fair, I did buy something at Michaels every day, and Target was next door, and it was a good distraction for my lunch hour.)

This exchange also happened to take place on a day in which I received two boxes from Amazon. Again, to be fair, I am an Amazon Prime member, so shipping is always free. And Amazon shipped my one order in two different boxes. But when Kenny saw the boxes, he walked back in the dining room and said, “could one of your weekly goals be to only shop on Amazon once a week, or even a month?” I agreed, leaving out the fact that I had purchased something else on Amazon that morning.

Apparently, I have problems. They can’t be that serious, though, because I am keeping track of my spending (I have a spreadsheet) and I’m not in debt.

But I do love Target and Amazon.com.

(I plan on updating periodically on how we’re doing. The goal is to increase our net worth by $7000 by January 2011.)