Money Matters

Christmas is drawing near and for the first time it is a week before Christmas and I am all finished with our Christmas shopping, and more importantly right on budget! I am a budget person. I'm not a whiz with numbers or anything, but I can budget very well. So whenever something comes up that we will be spending more than a few dollars on we try to decide how much to spend at a reasonable price per person and stay on budget. For our monthly expenses we also have a budget and that consists of my handy-dandy spreadsheet that lays out all our recurring monthly costs, from our Mortgage right down to student loans and the electric bill. Anything and everything we pay each month, including a budget for food, is in the spreadsheet. This really helps me keep an eye on how much we are spending and maximize our savings.

Now you may be wondering how this all connects to the adoption. Well, as most of you know adoption in America is an outrageous cost to the adoptive parents, and for that reason we've been saving and saving for the better part of our married life. First it was for the house, now it's for our first adoption, better put our child. It is totally worth the sacrifices and we are fortunate enough to be able to save in this terrible economy. Nevertheless, when we first started out in our married life, saving money was rather difficult. We didn't plow things on credit cards or live outside our means, we simply earned and spent the majority of our earnings. But as when anything worthwhile comes a long, sacrifices have to be made. We decided that we needed to see where the money was going, thus the "Money Matters" Spreadsheet was born. This was truly an invaluable resource for the both of us. It really lays out exactly what we are spending, shows if we've paid the bills for this month and so forth.

Once we laid out where the bills and where the money was going we were horrified out how much we were spending on luxury buys, like going out for dinner, buying this or that just because it looked cute (my purchases), and going to the movies (Keith's one indulgence). Now we aren't saints or anything, we didn't stop shopping, eating out, and going to the movies. That would make life rather boring for us, but we did cut back quite a lot. We installed a few of these items in our handy dandy spreadsheet. We set a certain budgeted amount of spending for movies, an allowance for myself on shopping, and  a budget for eating out once a week at a nice restaurant or two fast food trips. Now this all goes back to our adoption savings. We want to be able to afford and since we have student loans we really truly want to avoid taking out any loans if we can, but if not only a small loan for our adoption. By putting a microscope on our spending and budgeting we knew where our money was going and how much "left-overs" we should have at the end of the month. This allows us to plan ahead and decide under what conditions we can put forth our profile for certain "situations" that come available.

As I've mentioned before in an earlier post, our adoption agency, Building Blocks Adoption Service,  presents us with "situations" or a general blurp about expectant birth mothers or birth parents and also consists of their due date and the estimated budget of their adoption plan. The adoption plan pertains to expected legal costs, medical costs, agency fees, and probably a few other things. The main thing in there, pertaining to budgeting, is the due date and the cost. By knowing the two variables of the due date and the cost we can say, well by this date we should or could not have the money saved for this budget. So if we decided we simply can't afford a situation we don't pursue it by placing our profile to the parents-to-be.

Adoption is such an emotionally charged struggle that I think it was in our best interest to have our budget and know for certain we can afford this or that. This is simply being realistic when in reality you just want to blind yourself from complications and go for every situation when in reality we wouldn't be able to afford it and it would just cause more stress and worry. Budgeting is just a tool Keith and I use that works well with our marriage,  I hope this post was helpful. If you would like a template for your own "Money Matters" Spreadsheet, feel free to email me and I can email you one. Hope you all have a lovely day!