This is something that’s been happening over the past 5 years, so it’s pretty bad.  We’ve known about it for a while, but never took it seriously enough to fix it – until now (hopefully).

I’m using Quicken now to track our spending, schedule and remind me about the bills.  It’s frustrating, but definately needed. I know we need to start a budget, and I’m doing that too, but the problem will be sticking to it. I think we are going to try the envelope system with our budget – it’s where you have an envelope for different expenses like food, gas, entertainment, etc.  What you’ve budgeted for the month for each category, you put cash in the envelope.  When you go to buy food, for example, you have only what is in the food envelope.  Once it’s gone, it’s gone.  Basically you have all your money spent on paper, ever item budgeted for before the month even starts.  Obviously, this will be a huge challenge for us.

The scary/downside to all this is – when I started the budget last night, it doesn’t look like there is a lot of ‘extra’ money after all is said and done… so I’m not sure how this will work. How can you pay down debt if there is nothing left after the expenses to add to your debt? I guess we’ll have to start cutting costs elsewhere by cancelling the cable and/or internet, eating cheap, etc. 

Anyone have any experience with this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.  All I seem to do these days is think about how to get out of this mess, so this won’t be the last of my blogging about debt…