Combining Finances

One of our January Monthly Goals was to set up a working budget. We didn't quite get this task complete because we discovered that combining your finances when you first get married can be tricky. You each have your own spending habits, your own separate bills, your own debt and now that you've said "I do" it suddenly becomes "our" habits, "our" bills, and "our" debt. 

Here's a little background on our money habits... 
Me? I'm a saver at heart. I can't help it. I hate the idea of being indebted to anyone! I also grew up in a family that didn't have a whole lot of money so I learned financial responsibility at a young age. I knew I wouldn't have help paying for college so I applied for as many scholarships as possible and got my first year covered. Awesome! After that year though, I was on my own. So I worked three jobs for most of college and paid for school as I went. Looking back, I have no CLUE how I survived working roughly 40 hours a week in addition to a full class load plus nursing clinicals!!! But ya'll, I graduated DEBT FREE! In addition to paying for school without loans, my senior year of college I bought a car. I had to take out a loan for that because I just didn't have thousands of dollars saved up because of my education budget. But I did pay that car off in less than one year. I refused to let that debt linger, so it was done and paid for shortly after I graduated. Fast forward a few more years... Next big spending... the wedding. We knew we weren't going to have much help on that either so we made lots of changes in our socializing and eating out habits so that we could save, save, save for the wedding of our dreams. And you know what? We did it. We paid for everything as we went, and once the big day was over, there was only $1000 on my credit card which we quickly paid off. So as you can see, I'm a saver. I don't like debt. I'm all for paying cash if you can. And if you must have debt, pay for it as quickly as you can afford to!
Now Pete's finances are a little different. I wouldn't call him a big spender by any means. He's definitely all about getting a good deal. But he does spend a little more than I do (on electronics... cough cough cough). And he does have student loan debt. He has more credit cards than I do (I only have one), but he does typically pay them off every month. Combining finances means that those couple of small debts become "our" debts. That was tough for me to grasp at first since I was debt free, but now I realized it's just another thing I can try to quickly tackle and pay off! I am up for the challenge!
So if we didn't make a budget this month, what did we accomplish? We did move all of our accounts to one bank and give each other account access. We decided for now it's okay for us each to have our own checking accounts until we get a good handle on what we are spending. We each also have our own savings account and we have one joint savings account that we opened when we were saving for the wedding. We plan to eventually have all of our accounts as "joint" accounts but not until we have a real budget that we are actually sticking to. 
After looking over many resources on budgeting and on newlywed finances we decided what we need first is to figure out where we are even spending our money. It's hard to divvy out spending amounts to different categories when you don't know what you're actually spending on a monthly basis. I might know what I spend in each category, but having not had access to each other's accounts before, we don't really know specific numbers for each other's spending habits. 
How were we going too figure all of this out? We joined Mint.com and loaded all of our accounts into. All of them. Our checking, savings, credit cards, retirement, mortgage, student loans, and car loan (did I mention we bought a new car recently!?!? Had to... Pete's was on it's last legs.. or tires I guess, lol). Mint syncs with all of your accounts to give you up to date numbers all in one place. It was very interesting to see our net worth laid out in front of us. Mint also categorizes your spending and puts it in nice little pie charts for you. This allows you to visualize how much your spending on groceries vs restaurants for example. It can be very eye opening!
We plan to track our joint spending using Mint for a couple months so that we get some accurate monthly estimates before creating an actual budget. Mint has a budgeting tool that we will probably try out, but I'm a paper kind of girl, so I will probably find some sort of pretty chart to print out and have right there in front of me too. Mint also has some handy little goal trackers you can use to keep track of paying off debts or for savings toward a specific goal. So we will set up goals for paying off the car, paying off the house, and saving for renovations and vacations. 
I'll get back to you on budgeting once we finalize a budget in a couple of months. For now, here are some of the resources I found while we were contemplating our budget. There's some general budget information, some handy printables, and some info on combining finances for newlyweds. Enjoy!
Budgeting When You Have Inconsistent Paychecks (perfect for nurses (me!), hourly workers, and online income) Income & Debt Tracking (She has some great printables too!) Making a Budget Binder Stay On Budget Organizing Finances Budgeting The Dave Ramsey Way Creating Your First Family Budget Steps to Manage Your Combined Finances Combining Finances (This girl is debt free! Check out some of her other great tips!)
Hope this was helpful! What helped you when combining finances with your significant other? Please share! :)

Our Wedding

I've been promising a wedding post, but I really wasn't quite sure where to start! It was such an amazing incredible day and I could literally spend hours going into all the details! I decided to break it down into the major pieces.. the things that brides spend their time planning and checking off their lists. Hopefully something will inspire you :)

I also felt it was a little too much for a single blog post, so with a little inspiration from Young House Love, I decided to dedicate a page to it! Bear with me, it's a work in a progess. We had a very DIY wedding, so I hope to eventually add some tutorials on our wedding decor, some planning tips, as well as some vendor recommendations. This blog may be more geared towards crafts and home decor, but I loved every aspect of wedding planning, so I am happy to share anything that might help other brides!! Enjoy!

Please check out our awesome wedding photographer too! All of the posted wedding photos were taken by Anna Kerns. If you want the sweetest photographer around, check her out!

Backyard Oasis

Okay, so maybe it's not an oasis yet. But we've at least finally started working on it!! This wasn't on my January to do list, but we had a weekend off together (rare given my crazy nurse work schedule) so we decided to go for it. 

Our yard is FULL of azaleas. I'm not kidding, there must be at least 50 azalea bushes between the backyard, the side of our house, and the front yard. They're very large and overgrown. The neighborhood is full of them, so I'm guessing they were all planted when the neighborhood was first built. So we're assuming our azaleas were born in the 70s. Pretty impressive.
These azaleas might be old, but they need some serious help. Don't get me wrong, I love azaleas. They're beautiful, especially in spring. But do we really need 50+ azaleas?? In the backyard, we could gain an additional 15-20 feet of yard space if we removed some. But the thought of getting rid of them altogether makes us feel a little guilty. So the plan is: trim them down to waist height (some of them are 5-6 feet tall), transplant them (by moving them back 15-20 feet to the actual fence line), give to our friends/family any that don't fit along the back fence. Sounds reasonable, right?
So yesterday we decided to start trimming. Garden enthusiasts would tell me that January isn't really the best time to do this, and we did have every intention of doing it in the fall when it's recommended to trim/transplant them, but time just got away from us. I feel like these bushes are so old that nothing could kill them, but we'll see. Besides, I've got 50 of them; if a few don't make it, it will be okay. 

So we pulled out our electric hedge trimmer (it's a Black and Decker we bought at Home Depot in the fall) and a couple of big orange extension cords and got to work. 

Pete was the trimmer and I gathered the trimmed branches and put them in a pile to dry out for the fire pit. It was a pretty easy process and made a huge difference. 

That's one of four piles we made that size of branches we trimmed!

We can actually see the back fence now! It's probably hard to tell in photos since everything is dead right now, but in the spring when we have more foliage growing I will post a before and after photo. 
Next warm day we have, we will start working on transplanting them all. I feel like that's going to be a longggg process. 
Happy Monday and have a great week!

Happy New Year!

Happy new year, everyone!! Hope you all had wonderful holidays! I'm sure everyone has been working on some new resolutions and goals for the upcoming year. I can't believe it's already January 6th! I feel like 2014 is going to fly by already! It's going to be another busy but fun year for us too! I have lots of bridal showers and bachelorette parties to go. Pete and I are both in his sister's wedding, and Pete is also in his best friend's wedding party. We have eight weddings to go to this year so far. Good thing I LOVE weddings!!!! I can't wait! We also have a few trips planned already. We'll be going to Louisiana for a few days in May to spend time with my relatives and then in July/August we'll the be going to the Outer Banks in NC with Pete's family. We also go on a couple camping trips every year in Shenandoah Valley in Virginia with some of our closest friends. Like I said, a really fun year ahead of us! 
As part of my New Year's blogging goals, I'm going to start make a list of monthly goals. Near the beginning of every month, I'm going to list everything I want to accomplish that month (everything that's bloggable anyway). I figure maybe if I write it out ahead of time, I'll actually hold myself accountable for getting it done! So here we go...
My January To Do List:

• Paint the living room. I've had the paint for a while but decided to hold off for the sake of not having to move the Christmas tree and all the furniture to the middle of the room around the holidays. I hope to actually get it done this month!
• Finish decorating the foyer/entryway. We painted it and instealled new light fixtures in November. I still need to find an entry table, a rug, and some artwork and accessories. I want to get it totally finished by the end of the month because once I'm done with that, I can finally move on to the upstairs!!!
• Organize the basement. This is going to be a tough one. We moved in rather quickly since we closed on the house, got married, went on our honeymoon, and moved out of our rental all in a two week time frame, so a lot of stuff just got shoved in the basement. There are piles EVERYWHERE. It's an unfinished basement, so it's not a huge deal. But chaos stresses me out. So I NEED to organize it!!!!
• Post wedding pictures. I would like to share our wedding with you! This month I hope to get some pictures uploaded and share some of the details with you!
• Update aquarium stand. Since we moved we put our saltwater fish into a smaller tank for ease of moving. Before we move them back to their bigger tank, we want to sand and paint the stand to match my new craft room/office area. This is something Pete can help with, so hopefully we can cross it off our to do list this month too!
• Organize the craft room. Before I move the aquarium into this room, I want to finish organizing everything to make space for it! It would also be helpful to be more organized so that I can start spending more time on crafts and scrapbooking without having to dig around for stuff. 
• Create a home binder. What better way to start off an organized new year than by building a home binder!?! I see them all over Pinterest and have started collecting ideas for things that I feel are important to keep track of. I'm currently looking for a pretty binder so I can get started!
• Set up a budget. Hubby and I are working on combining our finances and accounts so we are going to set up a working budget. Lucky for me, hubby works in finance, so it shouldn't be too tricky :)

That seems like a lot to accomplish in one month, but one of my personal resolutions is to be more productive, so we'll see how it goes! :) Please let me know if you have any ideas that might help me out with one of my goals!!!