I love YNAB! You Need a Budget is the budgeting software Jared and I have been using since early 2013.
YNAB uses a zero-based budget which means you budget every dollar you have. You can set up custom categories, and track all of your financial accounts. The software is made to link to your accounts, though I do not have it set up this way because I like to put in every transaction manually, like an old-school check register.
Our categories are pretty basic and haven’t changed much over the years, since we started. There is a Giving section, subdivided into Charitable Giving (my favorites are Atlanta Habitat and the Atlanta Ronald McDonald House) and Offerings for church. Next is a section for credit card payments, subdivided by each card. Credit cards are debt, but there is a separate Debt section subdivided into our Car Payment and Mortgage.
Next is Savings, subdivided into Emergency Savings, Home Maintenance, Auto Maintenance, Vacation, and Boy Allowance. After that is Monthly Bills, which includes Electric and Gas, Water and Trash, Insurance, Phone, Internet, Entertainment (which includes all our streaming services), and Web Hosting.
Then comes Every Day Expenses, which includes Groceries, Restaurants, Gas for the car, Medical, Clothing, Personal Grooming (Haircuts), Pet Care, Date Night, School Expenses, and Surprises. Interest on the credit cards gets lumped into Surprises.
Next is a section for Business Expenses— Jared’s work expenses,and my photography business expenses.
Finally, comes Annual Expenses. This includes Gifts, Safe Deposit Box Fee, Car Registration, Christmas, Taxes (this mostly refers to my estimated taxes), memberships (this includes the recreation center when our membership is current, along with Amazon Prime), and Family Photos.
As you put in transactions and categorize them, YNAB automatically adjusts category amounts accordingly.
You can set target amounts, both by total amount and by the monthly amount needed, which is supposed to help those who want to forecast. Sometimes I cheat and forecast a month or two anyway, though, based on anticipated income and any goals we may have.
Anyway, this is our budgeting software and how I have it set up! I love YNAB!
You can read more about why I write about what I write about here, especially when I write about my budgeting strategies.
Decorating with What We Already Have — Yesterday, I got a wild hair and decided it was time to re-arrange our living room.
Oliver has been complaining about the fact that we have to turn our smaller couch around any time we want him to be able to sit there to watch TV; our TV is mounted above our fireplace.
We have a fairly large living room that featured two couches; a leather couch and a smaller green fabric two-seater couch. Most of the time, in case we have company, we have had the green couch facing the coffee table and the other couch. That meant that the couch needed to be turned around when we had movie nights and more people would be watching the TV.
A little over a year ago, gracious friends gave me a settee for the studio. It will still be used for studio purposes. But in between shoots, the settee is going to live in our living room now. I moved it in, moved the leather couch and our coffee table way back into the previously unused space, and turned the green sofa around. I put the cream settee and the green sofa back to back. We will use the cream settee and the side chairsfor visiting with people. The green couch will be used by the kids or anyone when we are all watching TV together.
I am thrilled with the outcome. I added the sitting pillow from the peacock chair from the studio, as well as the “You Are My Sunshine” pillow that Jared gave me for Christmas to the cream settee. Our whole living room looks bigger and more inviting.
I had to be sure there was adequate walking room both between the cream settee and the leather couch for walking. Our primary entry into the house is the double doors right beside the leather couch. We really do not have a back side to our home. We have two driveways and the front door has steps. So, we mostly invite guests to come in the back double doors off our back driveway, by the garage where we park. We use the front door mostly for taking the dogs outside, or for guests that just want to come to the front door.
Decorating with What We Already Have
It feels like a new living room, and not a dime was spent on re-decorating. This is my favorite way of re-decorating because our belongings we have are more than adequate for our needs and to be honest- for most of my wants.
I did discover the limits of our luxury vinyl plank flooring that we installed when we moved in two years ago. There are small, slight scratches below the coffee table and below where the leather couch used to sit. They don’t bother me; actually, the pattern of the flooring makes any scratches look like they belong and blend really well. So, it adds a sort of lived-in character to the flooring. I stand by my earlier statements on social media that this flooring was far and away the best decision we could have made as an upgrade when we purchased this house in late 2021.
All of the pieces in our living room are either hand-me downs, or sentimental, aside from the leather couch. Our friend Johnny Jackson made the coffee table, our friends the Boyd’s gave us the piano, my parents gave us the green chair and sofa. My parents also gave us the cream chair after my aunt gave it to her, after my Nannie gave it to my aunt. (We pass furniture around in my family a lot, so things rarely actually leave the family.)
The cream chair’s upholstery has seen better days thanks to our cats, but that chair is well over 100 years old at this point. It originally belonged to my grandmother’s aunt, who was born in 1870. It is still as sturdy as the old days, having been reupholstered at least once. It is one of my favorite chairs in the house. It is so much higher quality than anything you can walk into a store and buy these days.
Thankfully, keeping scratching posts around the living room really does quite a lot to re-focus the cats’ energy on not tearing up the furniture. We didn’t discover that fact early on, but they’ve been in place over a year now and it’s really saving our furniture.
Financial (and perspective) overhaul — I am writing today from the skate park with Oliver.
Today I said goodbye to the Fuji GW690III film camera, as well as the Fuji X30 digital camera. They got sold at KEH to pay the difference for the iPhone 15 Pro Max I traded my old iPhone 13 Mini for last week. Verizon gave me a very decent deal on the trade-in, but there was a difference and the sale of these two cameras that basically always sit unused more than made up for the deficit.
When I bought the Fuji GW690III, I thought I would take it regularly to sessions and weddings. It came along like twice, but it never found a solid place in my work flow.
And to be completely honest, the iPhone 15 Pro Max replaces the “purse camera” function that the Fuji X30 served.
The Christmas break was a time of introspection and expense assessment, along with re-assessing both current and future priorities. It has been a healthy introspection period and Jared and I (mostly me) made a lot of changes to current expense obligations that will serve us well in 2024.
I have been a domain name hoarder for a long, long time. I won’t say how many I had, but it was a lot. For no good reason. Well, I thought they were good reasons when I bought them, but those purposes no longer serve me. So the great majority of them will lapse this year. I am 100% okay with that fact. I purged over the series of several days, bit by bit. It was sort of like shedding layers of an identity that no longer serves me.
I projected our income for the year, taking all things equal as though there would be no business income to rely on, and then I projected all known expenses and obligations for 2024, both personal and business. Then, I re-assessed every expense we have had for the past couple of years. 2024 will be the year of actually consuming the online education resources I have already bought into but may or may not have already used. There will be no more gear purchases unless something is sold, and that will not happen this year as everything is very useful at this point, unless I do decide to sell the gf 35-70 but I doubt it.
I still have to do it but I have already made a list of the regular groceries we have purchased and like to have on hand on a regular basis, but I am going to go through and itemize them by price and make out a realistic grocery purchase rotation. We have to be careful because grocery budget does get out of hand for us. Our restaurant budget has been out of control the last several months, as well.
Financial (and perspective) overhaul — Part of what has helped with this finance overhaul has been the solid step toward self-acceptance of the fact that, for all purposes that matter, I am a retired person at 44 years of age and our budget should reflect that fact, and there is zero shame in it, either. This photography business is fun and I love that I can do this, but the reality is that it is likely that I will be on SSDI for the rest of my life (well, until it converts to regular Social Security when I reach traditional retirement age), and 12.5 years into this SSDI journey I am finally coming to a place of self-acceptance with it.
Next to work on is getting over the shame that it has taken me over a decade of my life to accept that I am essentially retired. But that is work for another day.
I chose not to stay up for festivities on New Years’ Eve this year. I opted for a 9 PM bedtime.
It’s part of a decision I’m making to favor health and wellness over late nights in general. I was the first up this morning, though I slept later than I planned. So far, I fixed the sticky front door, have tended to the dogs, have laundry going, and have made a general plan for the day already this morning. It will be a good day.
I have resisted blogging (and journaling) for the better part of two years. For the past several days, I have made journaling a bigger priority. I am feeling better for it. It might be time to return to the blog, as well.
For a long time I have really wanted to pick and up and move to Atlanta. But the last several weeks I have been reinvesting myself in our home. I remember why I loved it so much when we bought it. (Plus, walking away from a 2.875% interest rate would not be the smartest idea). It is utterly amazing how just a few simple tweaks (that haven’t cost much, if anything) have made all the difference. I am trying to reinvest myself in our community a little bit as well. However, our church home will definitely remain in Atlanta. I am starting to think about getting out to volunteer somewhere. Maybe Open Hands will be the first stop.
Happy 2024 — Redecorating with Art We Already Had
Yesterday, I spent a good portion of the day moving artwork around different places. I rediscovered a watercolor my mother-in-law did that I always meant to hang but never got around to, a beach scene, whose frame glass had long since broken. I was able to re-mat it with a mat I had in stock for photo prints. All it needed was an 11×14 frame. When Jared and I went out for another project last night, we picked up a $13 frame for it. Voila! New artwork for our living room. The featured photo is the beach scene in question, as well as the new mat and frame.
I posted a photo of the artwork I moved in the kitchen on my personal Facebook, but here it is, as well. I’m super-happy with this configuration. From left to right the paintings were done by my Mama, Lucy King, two by a lady my French host family was related to when I went on a trip in high school, Gerald Byrd, and Laura Smith.
There is nothing to be done about the intercom command center on the left side. Jared would like to take them all out, but it would be a tremendous undertaking. Also, our doorbells are tied into the system. I haven’t given up on resurrecting the whole thing. The command center works and so do a few of the intercom panels throughout the house. But none of the doorbells on any of the three sides of the house work, and two of the three panels in the boys’ rooms do not work.
Art with Personal Meaning
Most of our belongings have some sort of personal meaning, and the art that hangs in our home is no different. The French watercolors are actually a funny story. I knew the lady was going to paint something for me because they asked me to pick between a few scenes for her to watercolor. They’d taken me to her home. She was such a talented artist. I picked a goldfish scene from a very old Japanese postcard. But the other scene is a road with a house and a castle in the background, which is the exact scene in Kaysersberg. We were there touring and my French host’s father very nearly ran over us, lol. He was a passenger bus driver. We were out in the road and had to hightail it out of the way quickly. When I looked up I saw it was him driving and he very clearly saw me. We all laughed when she presented me with the both paintings. I understood exactly why she had painted it.
I wish I knew the name of the artist. I called her the French Sarah Belle while I was there. She was not exactly related to my host family but she was close friends with them, kind of like our Sarah Belle was here. She only signed her work as “GW,” and I never knew her name while we were there. Google searches based on those initials with searches in the St. Die region in France reveal nothing. I’m sure she’s long since passed away, as she was an older person in 1997.
There’s a story about Lucy’s goat painting as well. Jared and I met online, and we watched a lot of movies over the phone together while we were dating. One of those movies being “Notting Hill.” I think Jared had the “Happiness is not happiness without a violin-playing goat” quote on his profile on Lavalife. So when Lucy painted the goat (even without the violin), I knew Jared had to have it. That painting was his anniversary present one year.
Laura’s painting of the Hubbard Slacks Factory in Bremen just reminds me of Ike and George, my Daddy’s parents. We’d always go through Bremen on the way to Rockmart when I was little. The cut through big Highway 27 hadn’t been built yet so 27 went through downtown Bremen. I swear I remember when I was super little (I must have been super little because George died when I was 5), driving through there with Ike and George and Ike talking about somebody she knew who worked there forever.
My Mama gave the flowers and apples painting to either either my aunt or one of my grandmothers. I don’t know who; we play “musical belongings” in this family and stuff ends up in other people’s household all the time. But I know she painted it in 1982 because the year is on it. I bet she gave it to one of them for Christmas that year. If I had to guess, because I don’t remember it hanging at my aunt’s or Nannie’s, I bet she gave it to Ike and then Lollie ended up with it after Ike died in 1994.
The Gerald Byrd piece is the newest addition. It came into the house because Jared and I got tickets to his painting party on December 16th, a couple of weeks ago. The theme was abstract art and the point of the painting party was really to do a new piece yourself. But I love Gerald’s art and wasn’t really interested in doing a piece myself, so I spoke up early in the demo piece and claimed it instead of painting one myself. Then watched him paint it for the whole class. It’s a reminder of a super fun night where we met some really great people, and we got to visit with Gerald and his pup Andi for a little while, It was a really fun date night.
Happy 2024– Meet Arthur
Arthur made an appearance on Facebook yesterday, too, and I learned that Arthur has a cousin, lol!
This is Arthur. My aunt named him.
Arthur was painted by my Nannie’s first cousin, Inez, sometime before 1925. He lives in our bedroom now, but for all my life until 2012 he lived at the end of my Nannie, my grandmother’s hallway. That hallway was dark even in daylight most of the time, so Arthur was ominous and scary to me as a kid. My aunt says he scared Nannie when she was little too, when she hung in Inez’s mother’s living room.
Inez and her Mama painted a lot of stuff– my aunt and my Mama have a lot of their paintings– oranges, different flower scenes, a moonlight beach scene.
When I posted him on Facebook, a friend of the family posted that their relative had also painted an identical scene to Arthur, and posted a picture of their family’s painting! My whole worldview shifted a little bit, lol, because I had always, my whole 44 years, thought Arthur was an original. But I called my aunt, and she was not one bit surprised that Arthur has a cousin. She knew of the friend in question’s relative and that person would have known Inez, who painted our painting, and they probably took lessons from the same person. So they probably used the same model for the paintings. It’s a very cool story. The community those folks grew up in and spent their lives in was really small and close-knit at the time.
I feel really fortunate to know (and be related to) some really talented people.
Making Home Less Scary
Jared working on our front porch
The scene here is not nearly as bright as it is in the photograph. This is our front porch, and last night the string lights went up. I am hoping this is a permanent solution to make our front porch less treacherous at night, especially when one of us needs to take the dogs out but also for when we have guests coming up and down the steps on the front porch.
The two lights by the front door do not give off really any light at all by themselves for some reason, so it has been really dark out there for a long time. It doesn’t bother the boys or Jared to take the dogs out there by themselves in the dark, but it bothers me. This will greatly help, as the street lights do not light up our yard at all. We were able to use command hooks to hang the lights, and I have ordered some brick clips to secure the outdoor extension cord powering the whole thing. Thankfully, there are power outlets on both sides of the front porch. Those power outlets are another indication that whoever designed this house was brilliant; we’ve known that since we looked at the house the first time.
Happy 2024 — Today’s Agenda
Today’s agenda includes working some in the studio, in the garage. We have to figure out a long-term solution to the power situation out there, which will likely involve calling an electrician. Eventually, I want a mini-split to heat and cool the whole thing. But, I think that is going to involve a whole second air conditioning unit. The house borderline needs one anyway. Not a today-type problem. But, the studio is supposed to double as an additional living area, especially when family who are allergic to cats visit.
There is still a dramatic lot of painting to do in the studio. Eventually the plan is to cover the popcorn ceiling with black decorative tiles. I also intend to continue the faux concrete polishing I started in October. The garage doors and tracks will remain in place because with white backgrounds, the outdoor lighting is pretty essential to getting the shot. I would have liked to have taken the tracks down and covered the doors, but Jared has convinced me it’s not practical. I am okay with that fact now
For today, it will be enough to concentrate on the sheer amount of cleaning there is to do, because there is a ton of it.
There are two huge closets in the studio. One of them is Jared’s office, and for now the other contains outdoor equipment and tool storage. The plan is to clear out the leftover things in storage in our tall finished crawlspace and store outdoor equipment in there, and then turn that second storage closet into a changing room and storage for the studio.
Jared is re-hauling his office today, too. A much-deserved space for him.
