Crap.......diapers are expensive!

I can't believe it's been nearly a month since this precious little girl entered our lives!

It's been an amazing month and she has brought so much joy into our lives.  Also, she has brought a lot of dirty diapers.  I had always heard that diapers were expensive, but wow...I was not prepared.  Neither for the price of the diapers or the shear quantity that would be needed.

Being the tight wad that I am, I set out to determine which brand was best.  My first study was on strictly price and these are the average, per diapers costs that I found.

Based on this graph, I was convinced that we needed to just purchase the generic Walmart or Target brands. Based on her using 7 diapers a day (seems like a lot, but we found it pretty normal so far), we would save $18.90 that month by going with the cheap brands in comparison to a Huggies.

So we bought a pack of the cheap kind and consequently realized there was definitely another criteria to be considered when purchasing diapers: quality.

You get what you pay for and when dealing with poop, it's just not worth going cheap!

We decided to go with Pampers and have found them to be very reliable and we are definitely willing to give up the extra money.  If you're willing to do a little extra legwork, you can generally find bulk pampers online for a pretty good deal, around .18 cents a diaper.

Life Insurance.....Term or Whole Life??

I'm a few weeks behind in my plans to have life insurance by the time our baby was born, but it's a lengthy process and I wanted to do enough research to help me make a sound decision.  My debate was whether to purchase a term life policy or a whole life policy.

Here's some definitions:

Term Life: A policy that covers the insured for a specific dollar amount in the event the insured dies during the "term".  The term is generally 10, 15, 20 or 30 years.

Whole or Permanent Life: A policy that covers the entire lifespan of the insured.  This policy also combines the death benefit amount with a savings/investment vehicle that builds value over the life of the policy that the insured can potentially withdraw from.

Working for an insurance salesman gave me great insights into this industry and helped me in my decision.  Originally I was convinced that I wanted a whole life policy.  My reasoning being that I didn't want to feel like my dollars spent on life insurance were just being thrown away if I didn't die in the "term".  With a whole life policy, I felt that my premiums were going towards a cash value that I could use in the future.  What I didn't realize until I got some policy quotes, was that whole life is generally 8 to 10 times more expensive on a yearly basis.

Insure to Insure & Invest to Invest


I had heard this before, but it was now starting to make more sense.  My purpose for buying life insurance is to mitigate the risk of leaving my family with nothing if I happen to pass away, not have a high cost investment vehicle.  I am willing to give up some of my money now, to not have that huge expense given to my family.  Even though a whole life policy would grow it's cash value, studies have found that if you take the difference between what you would spend on a whole life policy and a term life, and invest that amount into a common investment vehicle, your returns will be much higher in the long run.

So I'm buying a 30 year term policy and I feel much more confident in this decision now, so just cross your fingers that I don't croak between now and when the policy is in force.

That Dreaded Budget!

Everyone knows how important it is to budget.  I imagine that you have told yourself a million times that you need to do better at budgeting, but when it comes down to it, you always fall short.

Why do we always fall short? I think the main reason for this has to do with the amount of time and effort that it takes to create and implement a full-fledged budget. It's SO tedious and most of the time it just makes you angry because you realize that on top of spending hours analyzing your finances, you will need to spend hours finding ways that you can make your expenses meet your budget restraints.  It's not an easy process.

There is a better way though!

Mint.com

For the past 14 months I have been using this FREE service to help me manage my finances.  It's so simple and it's saved me hundreds of dollars over the past year or so.  Basically, this program links with all your financial accounts (checking, savings, investment, loan and credit card) and categorizes each transaction, allowing you to easily set budgets and track your progress toward meeting you financial goals.

Back in September, Mint sent me an email saying "you have exceeded your budget on groceries".  I logged in to see just how much we had spent that month.  It blew me away - $528.09.........in one month.......for two people!  Since then we decided to watch our grocery budget much closer and Mint gives us the ability to see how we are doing towards reaching that goal.  Let me show you a screenshot from my Mint account.

Since September we have been doing better at keeping our grocery spending under control. As you can see we hover around that $300 mark, which isn't too bad. This month we are going for $250 though....we've clipped quite a few coupons!

Take the time to make Mint.com your primary budgeting tool.  You won't regret it for a second!