My husband was paying bills when I called him on my lunch hour today to gripe about how unhappy I am at work, feeling under the gun for reasons not within my control.

I saw an ad for a part time position at a local college this morning.  It's only funded through the end of June and thought, "This is perfect, I make my exit and buy myself some time to really think about what I want to do."

But after paying the bills, my husband said, "I gotta tell you, I'm nervous about the idea of you going to a part time temporary job.  My salary just isn't enough."  

Of course he's right, but if I don't take a leap now, when should I?  We've survived on less in our lives for longer periods of time.

The past nine months when we've both been working full time, we've managed to stow away some savings and also upped our spending levels, including an expensive one-week camp for Miles this summer that I'm now regretting.  We've become used to having a nice amount left over after paying the bills.  

Still, while it's nice to feel that cushion, will our thrifty tendencies prevent us from tackling new horizons?

SO bad. And I know it. I KNOW I have to cut discretionary spending. I know I have to stop using equity to bail myself out of my spending.

And yet... $100 at Target this weekend, and for what, I couldn't exactly tell you. Found some cute stuff for Lily's party, which is probably back into the $400 range, just to have it at home.

Last month, we cashed in my 401K rather than transfer it with the new job. I had been laid off long enough to make the increased income and fine be a bit moot, and got rid of all our bad debt. Now it's just car loans for a few more months and student loans for a few more years. We're cutting up the cards, because we can afford to, but then the extra money I'm supposed to be squirrling away is somehow spent between the two of us. Every year DH and I talk about how this has to stop. We get better, then slip. I think I have to start an automatic pay to the savings account and tell myself that money simply doesn't exist!

my parents are frugal.  Perhaps even stingy.  But they make budgets and think about money effectively.  I am horrible with money, in the sense that I hate to spend it, ever.  I have a really hard time trying to get DH to not spend money on certain things, because then he just says, yeah but you never want to spend money on anything.  And now, finally, I have come around to wanting to buy stuff, like a house, and we can't because we got so screwed with the last house and the medical bills and the long periods of unemployment that we have to do bankruptcy and start over.

I am presently procrastinating the dreaded task of tallying up how much our move has cost us.  We can really crank down and save money for periods of time when we need to, and have done so for months at a time when we needed to pay off debt, or when one of us was on leave for a period, or when we're saving for a vacation or something we both want.  As long as we keep careful track of our spending and can see our success against our goal, we're fine.  

But then, but then...

Sometimes we realize we need X.  And we set a budget, and then it's like open season for a bit.  Like, in January my DH rightfully pointed out that he hadn't purchased any clothes in years.  And was in a position where what he looked like actually mattered.  So we set a budget, and spent it in a weekend, and now we're back on lock down.  Or we were, until we moved.  Movers and the assorted and sundry items we need for the new place have been given a budget which I think we've burned through.  But I'm kind of afraid to look.  

I come from a family of savers and my husband doesn't, so there was lots of "passionate discussion" about money early in our marriage.  We are in pretty good alignment now which makes this all much, much easier.  

--R

...and when we got married, I used my savings to pay off his student loan so we'd be debt free.  Then we saved for a condo, which was purchased with a nice down payment.  We're living the frugal life and it's hard because we are surrounded by people who seem to "live life more fully" than we do.  We're living in a very expensive region in a house that gets older every day (and was not constructed well to begin with) with a couple of kids who get told, "No, we can't justify that expense" all the time.  We deprive ourselves until we can't stand it anymore.

We clip coupons and drive "old" cars. We don't hire babysitters or go to the movies. We accept bags of hand-me-down clothes from kind people. The kids have not had swim lessons, they don't play sports, and we don''t enroll them in crafty classes. (We're paying dearly with our son, too, he's the least well-rounded kid in his class and is painfully awkward with his peers).

I'm proud to say I stretch DH's modest income to its fullest - we are debt free except for the mortgage, we have savings for the inevitable (the house is a ticking time bomb, I just know big repairs are in our future), we have some IRAs for retirement, and we do most things ourselves (yard work, house cleaning, car wash, etc.).  We don't eat out often (brown bagging for lunch most days), we don't visit trendy places Starbucks (I hate coffee, anyway), and we order water when we go out to eat in lieu of soda.  Our house is not as "fixed up" as our neighbors or friends houses.  

My parents were born in the 20's and lived through the depression.  They were taught to be frugal and that was passed down to me.  DH grew up in a household where his mom (a single mom) didn't have much money and when he visited his dad, he didn't seem to have much, either.  

All I can say about this is that, if I had it to do over again, I would not want to deprive my kids as much as we have.  When the years of sacrifice stretch into decades, it begins to take a toll.  You have to live life.  Being constantly worried about money is not living.  

I'm not sure I need to be worried about it, but I don't know any other way.  It's like a habit.

At almost 23 he has made many of the same financial mistakes that I made at his age (read that as: I couldn't really yell at him too much!!)

He has managed to get a checking account again but would not be able to get a c/c due to his messy credit report and I told him to be thankful. I think he is finally getting the hang of this 'patience' thing. Taking things one day at a time, one paycheck at a time and not blowing all of it in 2 days.

Learning to live within your means and sticking to it is so so so hard in this consumer driven world. I mean - aren't you supposed to buy the iphone as soon as it comes out? Don't you have an HDTV? Etc etc. VERY hard to withstand that onslaught when the c/c is right there to be used.

Lincoln is suing me for sexual harassment.

DH and I both come from very frugal families, plus he's an accountant, so we're both really, really good at setting budgets and then sticking to them. When we moved to Paris, I didn't have a job for the first nine months due to visa problems, so we started from that. Then when we moved to London, I was in grad school for the first year, and unemployed for about four months after finishing with that. During that first year in London, we paid my grad school tuition in cash and saved enough for a 20% deposit on a flat, all on DH's salary.

We were ridiculously cheap - bus passes instead of using the Tube, because they were 50% cheaper; we'd go to cheaper open-air markets and bulk buy all our produce and meat to avoid paying supermarket prices; I made our lunches every day; and we set ourselves a discretionary "fun" budget of 50 pounds. For both of us. If we had leftover on Friday, we treated ourselves to a pint at the local pub and split a pizza after. It worked. And once we got our mortgage and I got a job, we pretty much stuck to the same budget - altough we upped the discretionary budget to 50 pounds apiece. Whooo... All extra income went straight onto the mortgage. It was a great success, but only because we had something to save for, it was term-limited and we were young and enthusiastic!

Of course, I will as usual emphasise that I had the greatest start in the world in that my folks paid all of my college bills (books, clothes and any fun spending were all on me). I did have about 50% of all that in scholarships at BU, but still, thanks to my folks farsight, I graduated and didn't have to pay about $60,000 in the residual half. I also totally avoided credit cards until my senior year, when I needed interview clothes. So when I graduated, I only had about $1,000 in debt in my name. God, I was lucky.

With a large family, its a must.  Even still, I feel as if sometimes our kids just don't get it.  The other day, I had to threaten to send my son a monthly electric bill if he kept leaving lights on at night.  I suppose there's some things kids just don't understand until they get out on their own, though.  We've often talked about what kids should know about their parents' finances.  Well, I will say this...as my kids got older, we had to start pulling back a little on the information sharing.  They would look at the amount their father earned, and take away from that that we should always have "plenty of money" and had a very difficult time understanding what our real living expenses were.  We'd have a lot of whining about wanting this or that and how we were just being mean or stingy because we weren't rushing out to get it.  Now, I know that we can go over all of our expenses to give kids a better picture, and we do that...but you know, kids have damn short memories sometimes and it gets very tiresome to go over all the incoming and outgoing every day!

I don't think my kids are doing too bad as far as accumulating debt during college years. My son is in community college.  Two of my daughters did two years at community college to keep expenses down.  One transferred to a local university this year and another will transfer next year.  The one transferring next year lives away from home, but works full time to cover her living expenses.  My daughter who transferred this year moved in with her significant other who pays for all of her living expenses.  She is only working on campus about 110 or 15 hours a week at a graphics job she really loves.  She should have her degree next year, but she's planning on doing graduate school, too.  Because they did community college for two or three years, neither should have to borrow more than $15,000 to get their bachelors...that's a reasonable amount, I think.  However, my daughter going after her masters will probably go in another $40,000 or so before she's done.  

I worry about this daughter a bit.  She went from living at home, where all of her living expenses were covered, to living with her significant other who covers all of her living expenses.  She still sometimes seems to fall back into that "but you guys(us)/her fiance make a lot of money so you're just being cheap" way of thinking.  I hope in time that they work out a way where she is somehow a little more responsible for handling finances...I think its going to be the only way she will ever truly grow up.