I'm an engineer with a great company, gross salary is about $84k. I bring home about $4,600 a month. My husband works for a small local company, blue collar, no degree, typically brings home about $1,600 a month at a pay rate of $13 an hour. **side note: he just got a new job and will start in 2 weeks. This will increase his hourly pay to $18 an hour. I estimate this will increase his monthly bring home to be about $2,000 a month.
We have 3 kids. We live a modest life, dont drive fancy cars or have new clothes. Heck, I havent bought myself new clothes in the past 3 years because we simply cant afford it. Our kids wear hand me downs. We havent been on a vacation in 4 years. We have one car payment, $350/mo. We have a few student loans that total to be about $600/mo. We are renting a house at $1,250. I spend about $1,000 a month on groceries (for a family of 5 that's not too bad).
I'm struggling because we are constantly living check to check. We dont have a pot to piss in. We have nothing in savings and we are constantly broke. I maintain a budget, I monitor our accounts, I know what we have coming in and going out. But obviously we are doing something wrong... I just cant understand what we are doing wrong or why we struggle so much when we bring in decent money and we dont spend excessively. It's so frustrating and I'm at my wits end. I wish there was someone or some service out there that would be willing to sit down with us and go over my budget spreadsheet with us and help us to identify our problem and help us come up with a plan to change our financial situation. see comments for detailed breakdown of monthly expenses
Submitted February 02, 2019 at 02:29PM by YellaHamma17 http://bit.ly/2t3BXoY
