Long story: but wanna share. New to this budgeting thing. my husband and I realized we live paycheck to paycheck pd biweekly and we make decent money but always are behind on everything. We have no credit cards or car payments but have 3 small personal loans from family less than 1K total and 1 personal loan $2k. We also have 2 major student loans over 30K total for both of us but have not had to pay either yet. And somehow we are always "short" until next paycheck. We both have our own checking accounts and just divide up the bills but then of course seems like we miss one or assume the other has paid it. Lots of impulse buys: gadets and whatnots and seems like we like to go out to eat and spend money buying snacks here and there especially on energy drinks etc. Finally! peeled the bandaid and looked at our credit scores and we can see items that are on there that have to be taken care of (random debts: mostly small medical debts under $200 that are delinquent etc. ). Finally started communicating and decided that we needed to fix our $ situation. We want to be debt free with a good credit score and buy a house rather than rend and be able to save (no actual goal amount). We sat down last week and went over our checking account expenses and started cutting down expenses like subscriptions we don't need or use. We realized we were both paying for Hulu ♀️, that we had both Spotify and Pandora, and other subscriptions like Kindle, Audible (I use the library alot too) gym membership, Stitch Fix, Loot Crate etc etc etc. we were able to cancel duplicate items and unnecessary subscriptions. We calculated our savings just doing that to a total of $155. per month. Also, Tried the envelope thing this past paycheck and seems like we underestimated our grocery budget by $29. 70. I took it from another envelope which is bad but we need to eat this week and everything we got was necessary. No cookies or chips etc but we did get soda to start weening ourselves from costly energy drinks. The envelope I took from was the "get caught up envelope". I budgeted $210 this paycheck to help get caught up on bills we are behind on but had only used $148 to get caught up on internet. it just sucks not to be able to go buy whatever I want at Costco or have to wait until next paycheck. It sucks not to be able to run to the store when I want a random item or feel like I need something. I am planning on having a yard sale in 2 weeks to help get funds to get caught up another bill and I got a $4. 55/per hr raise this week so that will definitely help us get caught up and on the right track. THANKS for sticking around to read this. Any tips suggestions or advice? they would be greatly appreciated
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