August marks one-half of a year trying to live on a single teacher's income. We struggled staying in budget this month with the added expenses of school starting along with a trip home to visit family. This definitely added to our expenses in the gas, dining out, and miscellaneous categories. We also had the expense of a home repair that had a cost of more that $300. When it was all said and done we spent $345.34 more than we brought home in income. This is were the trouble begins for most families. If you have no savings and no other income coming in most people turn to using a credit card. It would not be a huge problem if in the next month you could try to cut some expenses and pay the entire credit card balance off with no interest. Unfortunately, that is not what happens in most cases. Most will pay the minimum and now you are stuck paying interest to a credit card every month on top of your monthly expenses. When this happens the credit card debt can add up quickly. Just two or three bad months out of the year can easily leave you with over $1,000 in credit card debt. In our case we do have a second income coming in to bridge the gap without using a credit card. We will work to cut our expenses more over the coming months so that we can reach our goal of only spending our single income. Currently, after six months of tracking, we have spent $252.07 more than we have brought home in income. Here are the numbers for August:
