I took zetta's advice and decided to purchase a book called All Your Worth and I have to say that it's really getting me going about exploring how and where the money goes. I paid $9.99 for the ebook after researching at Amazon (who had it for as low as $3.67...but with the additional $3.49 s/h and waiting for the book I figured an extra $2.83 was worth getting the book immediately and starting in on it!) I usually check to see if the book is available in ebook form and also check ebay and amazon (you can usually find great deals but make sure you figure in the s/h!) for cheap copies. Ebooks are good because you're not having to make room for the book and it's more portable (I can put a copy on my PDA or laptop and it goes with me.) Now to the book!

I'm about 60 pages in but the book's fundamental principle so far is to have three groups: Must have's (to live!), Wants (can you live without it?) and Savings. Your goal is to be able to fit each category into a percentage (50 percent on must have's, 30 percent on wants and 20 percent on savings.) Now there are a lot of little tidbits I will not go over because I'm not going to give away the book in a blog (not fair to the authors!) but there is one part of the number game that I thought would be helpful to people with credit card debts. It's so simple I wish I had thought of it on my own. Basically figure out what your credit card balances were one year ago (if you can get a statement or if you have the statement) and what they are today. Then subtract 1 year ago from today and put it down. Do it for every card you have and you'll get a real idea of how much of a dent you made in paying down your credit card debt. If your balance today is higher than it was one year ago you'll know you need to do a better job paying down that card's debt because you're not making enough of a dent to get yourself above water! It's simple enough and to me it was a very effective tool in seeing what lenders see as far as account history. Now this is just one small part of your journey through this book (like I said I'm only on page 60) but so far it makes a lot of sense and I will certainly be applying some of the ideas to get our spending under control. The nice thing about this book is it allows you to be very flexible and not have to micro-manage your finances. If you're someone that would rather work with a simple percentage for spending and savings this book is for you. They also help you get what you spend on in the right places and they do a good job of explaining it in simple terms. So far I highly recommend reading it (and I thank z for recommending it!)

***Monday spending***
$9.99 for ebook
$17.05 at Eckerd for personal care

The ebook I put under books and the Eckerd trip was toothpaste (bought a couple of tubes) and deoderant (Degree was on sale so I bought a few!) The wife got some candy for her desk at work. So from Sat-Mon we've spent $76.04 on entertainment, books and personal care. OR if we followed the budget advice in this book we spent $65 on WANT's and $11 on MUST HAVE's (though we didn't go to the grocery store for the toothpaste and deoderant where we usually get these items but it was because the sale price was better than our grocery store!) See if you're more of a lump sum budgeteer your life can be made easier by reading All Your Worth. I sound like a salesman but there really seems to be some good advice in this book.