Stress is never a good thing when you're pregnant. Work isn't stressing me out, which is a first as the other jobs I've had would lead me to pull my hair out (figuratively speaking).
No, its just stressful to think of money. I have no control over it, well OK maybe limited to partial control. I don't want to claim control, because then I have to own up to the mistakes we've made with money.
But we're trying to be disciplined. Its hard! But we're going off of the Dave Ramsey cash only theory and it seems to be working out OK. Just when I get the discipline and strong desire to get us really straightened out....we have to start planning for baby furniture. When you get rid of a car payment, medical bills add up to the same amount not freeing up any extra money. Babies are expensive! I appreciate more and more what my parents did for me and how they did it while staying relatively debt free!
My biggest stresser is income. Come the end of September I will not have a pay check until I go back to work. I do NOT want to go back to work 2 weeks after giving birth to my first child. I WON'T go back to work that early. So I've been bugging Jose to get a job. Poor guy, never gets a break it seems. But we set a goal for what he needs to make this summer so that we can still stay afloat while I am off work on unpaid maternity leave. ( I will be paid, but really for a short amount of time, getting pregnant didn't fall as I had planned....typical). We had a good opportunity last summer to earn a decent amount of money and it looked promising for this summer to. Well that fell through. Good thing I had a few months heads up! I hadn't figured that into anything yet, so we are still where we were a week ago.
But last night.....I felt some relief. I have been automatically having money withdrawn and put into an savings account. One that we can't touch (it would take days to get money released from this account) I don't really check it that often, I figure the less money I know I have, the less I spend. I had nearly double what I thought we had!
God is so good. I had just spent the previous 2 hours pouting and stressing and getting really mad (at money). I literally was about in tears walking through the grocery store knowing we had little money, plus I was going to spend more money on an unexpected grocery shopping trip (it was only $3.00 but I was at the grocery only an hour earlier for other things). So to come home, and look up this savings account and find that I had more money saved up than I had originally thought!
Actually, we have saved up now what my goal was as a minimum for when the baby arrived! So that just means that we have 4 more months of very active savings to do! I upped the Anni and we're saving more for the next 4 months.
I don't know why I stress about my finances and what we have and don't have. God has ALWAYS been faithful to provide. ALWAYS! When I am faithful and do my part, He is always doing his part. He was when we were in Des Moines, He was this time, and He will be when our little one arrives in September!
Phew....I don't have to worry about it!
