Menu Plan Monday - Not!

I keep meaning to post for Menu Plan Monday (@OrgJunkie if you need ideas for the week) but the last few weeks I've been planning more on Monday afternoons than Sundays. Unfortunately, this week our refrigerator has decided to give up the ghost, so we'll be without fresh foods til Wednesday at the earliest. This puts a huge damper on my menu planning skills.

Yes, I know many people (especially people who like to stockpile and therefore, need to rotate food) would consider this a challenge, to create a few meals without fresh foods... Having the refrigerator die on us has really been a blow to me.

I have come to the realization that while the purchase of a new refrigerator did not hurt us financially, it could have. We scraped together the money using our sparse savings, including some money we had set aside to build a deck this year. We both agreed that increasing our credit load was unacceptable, and managed to get a fridge that we both were happy with, while not spending any excess money that we did not need to.

But it made the pit of my stomach ache. I realize we don't have a large enough emergency fund, we have too large of a credit load, and we aren't doing as much as we can to get out from under our debts and create a solid financial rock to stand on. If Murphy decided to visit us right now, we could find ourselves between a rock and a hard place too easily.

So I've been rethinking our goals for the year, rearranging some priorities, and will be reworking the budget to see where we can trim some fat. I'll be posting some of our numbers and goals here soon so you can follow along, and hopefully cheer us to victory! Wish us luck!!

December Update

Christmas has come and gone and with it a modicum of indiscretions. I'm not so much worried about them at this time, as the goal for the moment was to simply survive through the end of the year without any major money mistakes. Although there are three days left of 2007, I feel confident in saying this has been accomplished.

My main issue right now is that our expenses are at an all-time high, while savings are at an all-time low. I'm going to be working on our budget for 2008 over the next couple of days and I'm hoping that I'll find a few categories that can be squeezed to the minimum levels to give us more discretionary funds for savings and fun things.

One big issue that I'm having with our budget currently is unaccounted-for expenses. When an expense comes up that hasn't been previously accounted for, we either try to shortchange other categories in an attempt to pull the money out of our already tight budget, or just pay the expense and hope for the best. Both practices end up knocking our budget on its ass, leaving us grasping at straws for the last few days of the month.

Two practices that I've been introduced to by reading other personal finance blogs have been budgeting every income dollar, and the emergency fund. These are those really smart ideas that you know you should be doing but aren't. I know both of these ideas are touchstones for PF guru, Dave Ramsey, who I haven't listened to yet. I guess I'll have to track down his broadcast and take a listen.

*PS - thanks to JW for leaving me a comment -- my 1st! I somehow didn't have email notification on, and with the holidays I didn't see it til today, so I wanted to let you know I wasn't ignoring you! Have a great New Year!