YNAB

Disclaimer: This isn't a sponsored post. I just like this product. 

At the end of last month, I mentioned to Matt that there was a budgeting program that several of my friends had mentioned and that it was also free for students. I thought he was going to shoot down the idea since he's been pretty stubborn about using his own method with excel. He said yes though and emailed YNAB and the next morning we had our free code in our email.

We spent the whole next morning putting in June's expenses (They were awful since we had moved, but on the upside, we did make more than we spent.) and then hammered out a new budget. 

September is bringing a lot of changes. The biggest one is that Baby X is leaving us after almost 16 months of me watching him. That means we are losing a pretty big source of income. I have a few plans and another small job lined up (it is one of my dream jobs) so I'm not worried about the loss of income in the long run. 

So with only living on one income and our new rent price, we set a new budget.

It works out so that we have $786 a month for all expenses that are not bills.

Here is what next month looks like...

(Click it to make it larger)

I know it looks pretty empty right now, but that's because we haven't filled in what's going in for the bills yet. We'll do that on August 1st. 

YNAB is basically a more user friendly version of excel. I hear it's a lot like mint but most people seem to like YNAB a bit better. We didn't look into mint since YNAB is free for us.

Monthly bills are covered by half of Matt's income. Whatever is left over is what we save for the month. The other half goes towards everyday expenses.

Other then food and gas, everything else we consider flex money. The categories under flex money are really subsets under it. We found it was easier for us to track it this way though. I picked what I was actually interested in tracking for our subsections. For example, I'm trying to eliminate shopping at Target and Walmart completely. (I don't have a problem with either company). Matt and I plan what we are expecting this month and budget that way. Like this month, we had a $150 medical bill to pay, which is usually not the case, but we also knew we were not traveling.

At any point, I can see how we are doing by clicking on reports. There are various charts that show different things. My favorite is the pie chart. This is what July looks like so far.

(Click to make it bigger)

I like it a lot so far, since it's easier for me to read than Matt's excel sheets and it automatically updates on my computer when Matt updates it.

We also tried a new way to manage day to day expenses but I'll blog about that another time.

This might seem kind of weird to blog about, but I'm really excited about it. Matt and I have some big goals that we are trying to reach and we need money for a few of them. Also, it's really nice having finances in order. It's a lot less stressful in general.

Anyway, let me know if you have any questions about YNAB. I probably won't be able to answer them, but I can point you in the right direction.

The Grad School Family Series: Moving

When we graduated college, we had a summer with no income in front of us.

We decided the best thing for us to do was to move twice, the first move was a practice move to Matt's parent's empty house in Logan and the second was to graduate school in Princeton, NJ.

The first move was a wonderful break for us financially. Since we only had a two and half month break between graduation and moving to Princeton, Matt and I both knew finding short term work would be difficult.Despite the fact we lived pretty cheaply, our expenses were about $1250 a month with rent, food, etc. in Provo. (We were thankfully on a month to month contract at this point.) It was only $400 to move up to Logan ~ 2 hours, and we kept our normal food budget of $50 a week.

So $1250 x 2.5 months = $3,125

$400 + ($50*10 weeks) = $900

Matt also donated plasma once a week while we were up there - which basically just ended up being our gas and spending money.

Then for our second move, we moved from Logan, Ut to Princeton, NJ.

We bounced around so many different ways to do this much longer move.

1) Flying Goobie and me out and have Matt drive across the country with his dad driving our car.

2) Matt and me driving across the country in our car and then Matt flying back and driving the truck.

3) Having Matt's dad drive the truck out and Matt and me drive the car.

We ended up choosing a variant of three. We had my mom drive out with me, and Matt and his dad drive the truck. (I could not drive alone with Madeleine.) This was wonderful for so many reasons: parent bonding time, went way faster, and more discounts on the moving truck.

We went with a Penske moving truck for both moves. They gave us the most discounts and they don't charge by the mile. We started with the 20% discount that our bank gave us. My mom had a AAA card so we got a 10% discount for that, and we got an additional 10% student discount! (You have to ask for it. It's not one that is done online.) I also asked the lady to waive the extra drivers fees and she did, saving us about $70. The total was around $900 with the damage insurance for the truck. With the gas for our car and the truck, our total for the move was around $2100. $1900 under what we had budgeted! 

(Sadly almost all of that savings went into our deposit...which we had forgot about.)

Another thing that really helped was not driving straight to Princeton. We actually drove to DC first where Matt's parents were living and stayed there for three days to visit. DC is only three hours from Princeton. By stopping, we were able to drive and unload the truck in Princeton after a full night of sleep. It was also nice because it gave us flex time in case Madeleine or us needed more breaks than we expected. We were pretty sure we could do the drive in two days, but if our six month old baby screamed the whole time, we had three extra days to drive a bit slower.

Visiting great-grandparents was just another perk of stopping in DC

So to summarize...

Our tips for moving across the country...

1) Find as many discounts as you can for the truck

2) Ask family for help

3) Come up with a plan way ahead of time

4) Travel mainly at night if you have a baby

5) Find a place that you can stay before you have to move in

6) Avoid tolls...trucks are really expensive to pay for on toll roads

7) Look on craigslist or freecycle for free boxes and paper

8) Get rid of as much stuff as you can

9) Watch videos on youtube if you don't know how to pack something

(Nothing broke during either move!)

All of this was pretty straight forward compared to heath insurance, which is going to be the next part of this series. :)

Choosing a school

Moving

Insurance

Our budget

Buying furniture and clothes

Menu planning and food management

Shopping for food

Affording a baby

Entertainment

Making friends

Family Time

Travel

The Grad School Family Series: Choosing a School

I wanted to write this series for a while...like two years, and just now I'm getting around to it.

I'm actually really excited for this. I was reading a blog a few weeks ago about how mommy blogs only write about what their kids are doing and not about their lives. Well, this was a huge chunk of my life for the last two years. I'm really proud of it, and I've learned so much, and I really want to put something on the internet that says, being married in grad school can be awesome.

I just want to start and say Matt and I are so happy - like legitimately content and at peace with our lives. 

That is such a relief to us because, according to the internet, 

happiness + graduate school + family = misery and impending doom. 

There are so many articles about divorce rates, cheating, eternal debt, and insurmountable stress during graduate school, and very few about families enjoying those years.

This was awful for me to read right after we got married. I swore if this whole grad school thing worked out, that I would write something positive on the internet about families and grad school. So here's me carrying our what I promised myself a year ago.

So here we go...

I started to look into graduate schools a year before Matt's applications were due.

As I said, the whole idea of grad school stressed me out, and around this time, I was debating if I wanted to go to grad school, work, or have an offspring, so I started looking into the process of choosing a grad school.

The first thing we did was make a list of things that were important to us.

List of things that are important for grad school

A good education

A livable stipend

Cheap housing

Reasonable health insurance

Doable work expectations

A few potential advisers

Trader Joe's, Cheesecake factory, and mall within 10 miles

Private school that was not in California

After we did that, I spent 4 months screening the top 50 schools for our requirements, while Matt studied for the GRE and subject GRE. I had found a timeline for him to follow kind of like this. (We used MIT's chemistry one, but apparently they took it down.) This actually didn't take much time. Many of the schools, I could cross off within a minute or two.

By May, we had his chem GRE score and he was just about to take the general GRE.

At this point, I knew he had a good shot of getting in almost anywhere.

(Gradcafe was so much help for this. We used their results page to figure this out.)

I submitted to him 15 schools that we could afford and had a TJ, Cheesecake factory and mall near by.

From those, he picked 9 of these.

Harvard, MIT, Yale, University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, and Scripps were our final 9.

While Matt slaved over his personal statements, school, and research, I hammered out detailed budgets for each of these schools. I found each school's stipend, along with reasonable housing options, health insurance, standard cost of food according to local grocery ads, and car and renters insurance. I also started to see what it would be like to live in these places the best I could without actually going there.

We wrote the mock budgets on the white board in our room, debating pros and cons of each school.

In the end, Matt only applied to six of these, and he got into all six.

At this point, I stopped caring about which one he picked. I knew I could be happy at each of these places and that we would be fine as a family (Here's the blog post about how I saw myself living at Princeton). The final choice was completely up to Matt, which of course in the end he chose Princeton. 

The reason I tell this story is all of this pre-work of choosing a school has greatly reduced the stress of living here. The mock budget we had made up over a year ago, we now follow almost to a t. When we found out our housing prices were going up, we were pretty prepared for it, and with a slight tweaking of our projected budget, we're going to be fine.

 On top of that, all those places that I mentioned in this blog post, I have been to dozens of times. I was sure that even if I didn't make a single friend here, I would at least have good food to eat and lots of free places to go. That has been a lifesaver on many occasions when Goobie and I get bored. We mall walked many times during the winter and many of our family dates are to local free events that I had looked into before we came. People made fun of me for my superficial list of stores, but I knew Matt was going to live in a lab no matter what school he went to. I was the one that would have to live with the city or town we were going to live in, so I made sure that at least my favorite stores would be around. :)

So here is what I'm thinking for this series

Choosing a school

Moving

Our budget

Buying furniture and clothes

Menu planning and food management

Shopping for food

Affording a baby

Entertainment

Making friends

Family Time

Travel

I hope you all find something to take from this. I've learned so much through this process.

The Princeton Review

Motto: "Under God's Power She Flourishes"

Mascot: Tiger

Colors: Orange and black (big points off for that)

Nearby Cities: New York City!!! and Philadelphia

Closest Hogwarts colors: none. :(

Best movie quote about Princeton: 

"Where do princesses go to college?”

“They go...where the princes go. They go to Princeton."

Famous People that went to Princeton:

There is a really long list on Wiki, but the most important is Andy from Toy Story.

Apparently in Toy Story 3 there are several hints that he was going to Princeton.

That's pretty awesome. :)

This where Matt will be spending all his time. It's the Frick Building and it's brand new.

All new equipment, lots of space, all organized.

Matt is completely in love with it.

We would probably live in this complex, Stanworth Apartments.

And this would be our grocery store.

Along with..

!!! No surprise there, since that was one of my requirements for where ever Matt goes.

The malls look pretty too.

There is even a cute looking Starbucks. Even though we don't drink coffee, I always feel a bit more at home when one is near by. Also in high school, the 10th grad class I TAed for defined civilization as where ever there is a Starbucks. So maybe that influenced me just a bit.

Anyway while Matt was gone, Baby and I went shopping in Park City with our friends Kaitlan and Claire. We also were supposed to go to a Princess Party at BYU, but Madeleine had no patience for it. So I just snapped one or two photos of her all dressed up, before she started crying again.

I really missed Matt. He helps out so much with the Baby. Also, she only sleeps well when she is sleeping with him. See how happy she is? She only sleeps like 3 hours a night this weekend. With him around, it is more like 8. She slept basically from 11 to 10 the first night he was back. I was thrilled.

Matt came home from Princeton really excited and tired. Doesn't mean we are going there though. He still has 4 more schools to visit. :) But what do you think? Can you see us living here?

Matt leaves for Wisconsin next. I'm really hoping he doesn't go there, but I'll still do a post on that one too. I'm a bit nervous and excited about where he will pick. We already know when we are moving out of Provo, now we just need to know where. 

Applying to Graduate School

You know what is stressful?

Having a husband applying to graduate school.

It started in January.

I woke up one morning and turned to Matt, “Honey, my whole life depends on where you go to graduate school, and that’s only like a YEAR and HALF AWAY!!!”

Matt was still half asleep and told me that if I didn’t like having my life depend on where he goes, I could go instead.

I didn’t like that solution either, and reminded him that it was in our mentally written marriage contract that he HAD to go to graduate school if he married me.

After a few weeks of fretting, I asked him if he was okay with me researching information about chemistry graduate programs. He said, as long I didn’t expect him to do anything, until school ended in April, I could do whatever I wanted.

And I did.

I researched schools, the requirements to get it, what it is like to live there, grocery stores in the area, etc. I made a nice powerpoint for him, with a cliffnote version of everything I found. I even asked his professors which ones he would get into. The more I researched, the better I felt about him going.

Until he started taking the test.

That almost killed me.

The chem GRE was in April. He had been studying for it, and honestly he felt pretty good about it. The practice test had showed promising results, and according to the forums online, only Asians did better than a 70%. Since my grandmother died, I was in Arizona when he took it, but he reassured me a bazillion times it would be fine, and that he would call me as soon as he finished it.

He called me after and told me that he thought he did good, and now all we had to do is wait for the score to be sent.

6 long weeks went by, and one Saturday, Matt was happily fixing his bike, when I checked the mail. There all by its self was the innocent look envelope with his test scores. My heartbeat sky rocketed and my hands starting shaking. One of the two test scores that would decide my fate was contained in there!

I ran back to Matt, and told him that I would be in the house, when he opened it. Then he could come in and break to me the news about how he did.

He thought I was being ridiculous, but did what I asked. He came into the house a few minutes later and told me he got 97^th percentile. I was sooooooooo happy!!! I proudly put the paper on the fridge, where it sat, until last month.

That’s when he got the general GRE score.

I was here for that test. Matt was a bit more nervous for it, and I was a lot more. While he took the test, I called my mom 50 times, and cleaned and organized our whole apartment. I could not sit still or get my mind off of it. I felt like I sent my sweet husband off to be killed.

After the long 5 hours, he finally called.

After I finished freaking out and feeling better that he was actually still alive, I asked him how it was?

He said, “It was fine -- actually I couldn’t have done better. I got…”

“Ahhhh, don’t tell me!!!! I don’t want to know yet. Just come home and tell me.”

“Uh…are you sure..?”

“Yes.”

When he got home, I still couldn’t prepare myself to hear his score, so he ended up typing his score on the computer.

Verbal             170

Quantitative    170

“Wait, isn’t that a perfect score?”

“Yep!!!”

Excited again.

Okay so fast forward to this weekend. (Sorry this is so long.)

“Matt, you need to start working on your personal statement.”

The weirdest thing happened. He curled up in fetal position around my foot, and started whining! (No joke.)  Then he kept asking if I loved him. I was so confused.

He was totally fine with taking the completely terrifying test, and completely owned them. But an essay, which he can revise as many times he wants and has a deadline 5 months away, that makes him want to cry?????

Well apparently, Matt’s kryptonite is writing his personal statement. It took him downing 2 lbs of strawberry yogurt, a 3 hour nap, and phone calls to his mother and brother,  before he could even get himself to start.

I’m proud to say there are two paragraphs written now! J

So if you are wondering why there hasn’t been very many blog posts.

You can blame applying to graduate schools, and me being pregnant.

Because really, this is all we have been doing.

(Oh… and Matt works 40 hours a week.)

PS. If you are willing to read Matt's personal statement, let us know...it's only 1000 words long.

Gold Star Husband

Matt is not home, so I wanted to brag about him a bit. During the last week and half, he has been a gold star husband.

A few bigger and not as cute things he has done...

§          He didn’t complain that life was crazy during finals week.

§          He let me cancel my ticket last minute, even though we didn’t get reimbursed (I didn’t buy the “insurance” on the ticket for full refund incase of death. Also that’s a pretty big deal for someone that is as money conscience as he is.)

§          He drove up to get my uncle at the airport the night before the Chem GRE, because everyone else was out of town (We offered to get someone else to do it, but he said he would).

§          He organized and cleaned the house up after our finals week pig sty, all by himself! (I was very grateful for this. The last thing I wanted to do when I got home from Arizona was clean our home.)

Small things that made me happy

§                  Helped me figure out what to do for Mother’s Day, and then helped me buy what I needed.

§                  Took me out to Tucano’s, because I didn’t feel like making dinner.

§                  Planted our garden, because I wasn’t home to do it.

§                  Figured out which plants we could plant here, since I am only good with dead flowers.

§                  Bought Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver at Walmart, because I had been waiting for it to come out for months.

§                  Read Altas Shrugged just so I could have someone to talk about it with. (True love right there. Who reads a 1,000+ page book just to make their wife happy?)

§                  Grab In’n’Out for Danielle and me while we were shopping, since both of us were hungry.

Then this morning, after I kept him up half the night (I wasn’t feeling well), rolled over and hug me, and said “Good morning beautiful” in my ear. I’m not sure if he knows this song, but I do, and it’s been making me smile all morning.