Earn more money!

I know that I am constantly talking about saving money, but the reality of the situation is that if you don't make enough money right now to pay your bills and put more than your minimum payment on those pesky credit cards, saving money is almost impossible.  The sad part of the matter is that income checks are getting smaller and bills are getting higher.  I recently took my own advice and I sat down to revamp our monthly budget.  I inputted all of our forecasted income for the rest of the year along with all of our monthly expenses into an excel spreadsheet.  Now, while my income is completely set, my husband earns bonuses as part of his income that are pretty difficult to predict because they are based on residential home sales.  So I find myself being extremely conservative in order to give myself the "worst case scenario." 

As I enter all of the numbers of the bills that must be paid, our mortgage, our rent, (yes we have both right now, I will share that story later), our utility bills, our daycare costs, insurance, car payments . . . wow it just keeps on going.  And by the way don't forget those bills that only pop up annually or quarterly like your SC property taxes on your vehicles or your HOA dues.  Regardless, I find out the hard way that we are in the negative even before we spend money on things like entertainment and eating out.  So for every dollar I spend in excess of our monthly bills, I am digging us further into a hole. 

My decision:  We need to earn more money, period.  So a few weeks ago, my husband and I both began looking for part time positions, knowing that really only one of us would probably be able to take on another job, because the other would need to take care of the girls.  But I have to tell you that we weren't looking for manual labor, or really anything that didn't jump out at us, we were looking for something that we would enjoy doing while making money at the same time.  BINGO . . . Ben found it, he found a job refereeing Soccer for Beaufort County.  It is in the evenings and on Saturday and fits pretty well into our schedule, and he loves Soccer so much that he would probably volunteer to do it anyhow.  We needed to resign ourselves to the fact that every dollar counts, and even if we are only bringing in a little extra a week, our budget tells us that we only need a little extra to pull us out. 

Some other ideas for earning some extra cash if you can't take on a part time job include holding a garage sale, selling things you don't need on Ebay, or selling your books that you have already read on Half.com.  If you are looking for a part time gig, search listings on craigslist.com, careerbuilder.com, or hotjobs.com.  It may take some time, but it will be rewarding in the end to know that you dug yourself out of debt all on your own.