Nervous Breakdown

Wow, It's been a while. Rather than try and regale you with all that's happened since I last posted, I'll concentrate on this past week or so.

Yesterday, I had a Nervous Breakdown. I was looking at my budget, and realizing that its a shitty budget, whish rreally its not because at least I know where the money comes from to pay the bills and the bills get paid on time and I'm not going further into debt spending money on credit cards I don't have, Nevertheless, I have one account holding my savings, my money for the trip to BC, and my rent money, and I don't know how much there is of what! Right now I know there is definately LESS than there absolutely needs to be, AKA I spent the savings and am cutting into the money for BC, or even worse, Rent. So, Ok I can fix this, I can put the money back from my CTB and UCCB and Child Support this week... Except that I don't know how to account for that in my budget. But I'll figure it out I always do, The issue is that this has been building for a week or so, and now I feel like the world is going to collapse on me, So yesterday I broke down in tears about the whole "money" thing. It was horrible. I still don't know what I'm going to do really.

What makes this whole issue 100X worse is that i'm a shopaholic. When I get stressed out, I go shopping. stressed out about spending too much money? Solve it by pulling out the debit card and spending more! Idiot! this needs to change. I can't really do anything before the trip though... But afterwards, big changes. big.

I've decided to try this Magic Jars system of budgetting (www.Gailvazoxlade.com, Till debt do us part on Slice), I've already got the budget set up, I've got my trusty budget binder, and I've got Jars ready to go as of June 1st (when we get back from BC). I'm hoping that this will help curb my spending habits (this and Toby taking away my debit card) as well as help Toby be more interactive with the budgetting and spending, as opposed to it being all me insisting it's all good. Ok but when its bad I tell him, so it's not like I lie to him.Nevertheless, we need to be equals in this, he needs to be as much accountable as i am, and with the budget saved in an Excel file on my computer, its difficult. Whereas, If the money is sitting in a jar on the shelf, and there's a binder detailing every thing we've purchased, He'll definately be more in touch with it, and I won't be able to hide any mistakes I've made. Hopefully this system will make it a lot harder to make those mistakes though! The only money that Is in my bank account is Bill money, and savings/emergency.  all of which can be handled from my online banking without my debit card.

I can't wait for August, Toby should be able to get a job then, oh it will be so wonderful! If this budget works, we'll stick with it, and just revamp the budget to include his income as well, It will be SO much easier when we are making a little bit more. I know money doesn't buy happiness, but in this case, it buys a whole lot less stress on my 4 person single (maternity) income family.


One more thing I'm going to do come June 1st, is SIMPLIFY, I know this is something Toby wanted me to do with my clothes and other crap for a long time, But I'm going to gather up a lot of the stuff I have, but don't use, and take a good hard look and decide if I should keep it, give it away, or sell it. Things ranging from Clothing, to crafting stuff, to DVD's and Books, I'm going to clean up hard core and simplify, while hopefully earning a few bucks getting rid of stuff I don't need. THIS TIME though, I'm not going to go out and buy stuff to replace it just for the joy of spending money! NO! I'll put the money away, and in future the rule will be that If I want to buy something, I must first get rid of an old item. If I don't have something old to get rid of, I don't buy the new thing. With the exception of course, of food.

Simplifying, Includes going through all the boxes of stuff I have in storage though, So my only problem is How do I break this news to Toby? that's going to be a big project in itself. getting everything out of the storage room, me going through it all, then putting it all back. I love you baby... *sigh* It WILL be worth it. I'm going to change. Old habits may be hard to break, but they aren't impossible.

Krysis