The Money Jar

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The Money Jar -- jam jar filled with money

The Money Jar

I’ve talked recently a bit about money — about living within your means (and how you first have to understand what those means *actually* are) without spending every cent you earn and about getting out of debt — and one of the key things involved with both of those concepts is budgeting.

And while there are a lot of things you can do in terms of figuring out your budget and properly allocating funds for necessities, I thought I’d tackle the concept of budgeting on a much more precise and personal level. 🙂

So this post is about our household Money Jar.

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Saturday Night Fever: Puss-n-Boots

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Like most people, because of the Coronapocalypse, I am now ordering things online at a rather alarming rate.

For me, mostly, this amounts to shopping on eBay and at ThredUP.

One of my fab secondhand finds in recent weeks were these:

black boots with white tips from ThredUP

I tend to unbox my online orders and just… leave them laying about in random places…

*laugh*

Until I am ready to try them on or put them away or say, “What was I thinking?!?” and give them to somebody more suited to The Thing I Ordered.

So these boots were thus ‘chilling’ when my husband saw them sitting next to the dining table and did a double-take, because — what with the soft texture and the black-and-white — he had flashbacks of “OMG, kitty!”

Once assured that I had NOT brought a new cat into the house (he is secretly terrified of me rescuing a new fuzzy buddy — so much so that he had a minor hear attack when he saw my new stuffed kitty sitting on the arm of my reading chair the day I got it), he walked over to where my boots were sitting and said something along the lines of, “Um. But those are… Sexy…? Boots?”

(In other words: He was befuddled. Because, menopause.)

I just smiled and said, “Yes, they kinda are, aren’t they?”

And left it at that.

Until a few days later when I decided to try on these mistaken-identity boots…

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De-moat-ed

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castle with surrounding moat -- image via unsplash
image via Unsplash!

There is normally a pile of some kind — a pile of stuff, generally; books and discarded-in-the-night clothing and random bits of things I have been using (like so) — that accumulates into a small mountain on the un-slept-in side of my bed. It serves as a barrier of sorts, though that’s more of a secondary side-effect than a primary intention, and since I am princess of this castle (or Duchess, if you please), my husband calls this mini-mountain of defense my “moat.”

He also tries to clamber over/through/around the moat at regular intervals.

(My response to this is to threaten that if he does not leave my moat alone I will fortify my castle with a dragon.) (I’ve heard you can get the non-fire-breathing variety for like $100.)

Which is what he did this morning, after rousing himself out of bed at the bright-and-early hour (read: NOT early, not even remotely) of 9:00am.

He started disassembling my moat.

After scattering my book pile — which was a bit of a noisy process because one fell on the floor and of course hardcovers make thudding sounds when they’re throw-stacked on top of each other — and generally creating a mess (the moat is NOT messy; it’s just… a pile…), he explained that he was not concerned about my ‘dragon’ threat in the least.

BECAUSE

“It’s my birthday,” he said.

To my rapid-blink, What does that have to do with anything? raised-brow ‘question’ he further expounded with:

“Consider yourself de-moat-ed.”

Debt-Investing: going from owing to owning

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Do you own your bankroll or does the bank own you?

When my husband and I first got together, neither of us was in a good place financially. He was three years out of a divorce and had absorbed the accumulated debt from his first marriage (and made subsequent monetary mistakes under stress) and I was carrying student loans and an atrocious amount of completely useless credit card debt.

We made good money at the time, but what we did with that money was not so good (though it was – and still is – quite common) in that we were stuck with habits we didn’t even realize we had, and in continuing to follow those habits, we weren’t getting anywhere — we were especially not getting ahead.

We both knew we needed to improve our financial situation but were well-enough off that it wasn’t a big priority.

But when we decided to get married, we agreed — suddenly, urgently — that it was, indeed, a BIG priority.

And so — being completely sick and tired of constantly owing money (instead of owning money) — we decided to invest in our debt.

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