Budgets???

My husband and I have never really had a "budget". Well not a written one anyway. We decided that in order for us to be able to survive on one income we seriously needed to rethink all our money decisions. This has been a major challenge for both of us; in the past we've been able to spend whatever we wanted and not worry too much about it. Of course our loose living got us in a few tight spots but we always managed to snap back.

We've spent so many years living freely and just purchasing things on a whim that now it feels nearly impossible to limit ourselves. It has to be done, so we sat down at the beginning of this month and discussed how we wanted to go about budgeting. Considering the fact that neither one of us has much experience with budgets we did a little research and a few Google searches as well as reading a few other blogs related to frugal living and budgeting.

I happened across You Need A Budget which is an amazing budgeting software that basically had all the functions we felt that we needed. I tried the demo first because I wasn't sure if it would work for us, and I showed it to my husband who almost immediately wanted to purchase it. So far it has been amazing and shows us when we've overspent on a particular category, or when we have extra to spend.

Despite having set ourselves up with a budget and some software to help us along the way, it has been incredibly difficult to change our mindsets. I think it may take a month or two, or maybe even more, to change ourselves for the better; I  have immense confidence that we have what it takes, we just have to continue learning and adjusting. I'll post links to some of the helpful blogs I've come across in my next post, or once I fully figure out how to format and use this blogger site I may put permanent links somewhere on my page. Can't wait to see how things progress!