Smart Habit Saturday

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My grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.

Ether 12:27

That is one of my favorite scriptures. It gives me hope that I won't have these weaknesses of mine forever.

April is my month of getting financially organized and apparently learning to bake with sour dough because it seems that I'm spending every spare minute babysitting my sour dough projects. Today it was sour dough pancakes, muffins and pizza. Tonight I'm starting on a new sour dough bread recipe because the last one was terrible. I used to think I had to be organized and prepared to bake homemade bread because it took several hours from start to finish. That's nothing! Sour dough bread takes days!

Anyway, if I hadn't spent all day baking I definitely would have worked on our new budget. Except that I'm not really going to make a budget. I just want to keep track of our spending so we are more aware of areas we can cut back. Even though I already know the area where we need to cut back. Eating out.

We have already cut back a lot since I've been doing better with meal plans but Stranger works out of town and that is a big eating out expense. I need to teach him to start packing some of his own meals. Or he needs to teach me. Or something.

My Mom spoke to a homeschooling group this week about being Rich On Any Income. It is a book that she took a class on years ago and it motivated her to start budgeting. What perfect timing for my goals this month!

My first assignment is to go through all our credit card statements and figure out what we spent in each expense category last year. It's going to be a big job so we'll see if I can get started on it tomorrow. I'll try my best to stay out of the kitchen and not play with the sour dough too much.

I have inherited Quickbooks from my MIL that I'm going to start using for my business and home finances and we have a new toy to get our receipts organized. I'll share more about that later.

Have a great Habit week!

If you are new and you want to catch up on last year - Smart Habit Saturday 2007

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