the results are in!

Hello faithful readers, we sure hope you have been enjoying this wonderful weather we have been having, especially since we all know what’s around the corner! An important part of this Project Money journey has been sharing what we have been doing and planning with you, and this week, we wanted to share some results. This is really rewarding for us because we have real and positive results because of making a plan and sticking to it. We have mentioned our budget and savings plans quite a bit because, well, this is a contest about spending less and saving more. LOL! Dustin and I have had many conversations about the pros and cons of our plans and have talked about many “what if” situations.  Well this month is not about “what if,” it is about what is actually happening. 

We have two awesome dogs and we love them a lot. For them (and for us) they go to doggy day care one day a week. This week we realized the pups had run out of doggy daycare visits and we needed to update their account. We buy a 2 dog/5-month package which lets us take advantage of a discount and saves us a few bucks every time we take them. However, even with the discount, this is not a small expense. Before Project Money, we just paid the bill and it would directly impact our main savings account. To help ease the shock of this recurring expense, we set up a savings account just for our dogs projected yearly expenses and we use automatic transfers to fund this account. When we paid the bill this time, it was exciting to know that the money was already saved and it didn’t negatively impact our other savings strategies this month. Our plan worked and better yet, we felt good about it!

Another success this week is with another savings account we call “Pork and Plow.” Every year, we buy half of a hog from my sister’s farm. This is another situation where we used to just pay the bill when it came time and it made it harder to save for other things because of this expense. As with other things, like the pups, we set up a savings plan a while back for our yearly farm and CSA expenses and again, let the automatic transfers do the work.

These two expenses alone are manageable, but to have them land in the same month would have usually made things like dining out or saving more money challenging. We would have made it work, but writing out those two big checks would have caused some stress and anxiety and even some buyer’s remorse. Using these types of savings accounts has helped us create a better savings strategy for these types of recurring expenses that are part of our budget, and keeping the money separate from other money we are saving helps us to see and set priorities.