A new me in 2010!

Can I make my goal in GPT this year?

Sunday, December 6, 2009

A new budget...

Conservator: A legal term that is used to describe an individual who is appointed by the court to manage the financial assets and affairs of and individuals that is under some kind of a legal disability.

My husband is considered 100% disabled by all forms of the US Government. He receives SSDI and a pension from the Navy because of it. As a result of this disability, he has a conservator. When we began dating and got married I saw no reason to try and change who this person was b/c he had been "with" her for years and was comfortable with her. So we kept her.

Over time tho she has changed. She's become hostile and just plain rude. She's no longer doing her job effectively so at this point, my DH has decided she needs to be replaced.

Since he has never seen me manage money for real (come on, 75.00/week isn't really managing money), pay bills, etc. He's reluctant to trust me. That's fine, I have no real issue with that, but he would like me as his conservator. It just makes sense to me now.

There is the problem that he doesn't fully trust me and there is the problem that I don't know how he will handle me telling him "no, you can't buy that b/c I won't give you the money for it," or "No, you can't know how much money is in the bank right now," and I'm sure you get my point.

So what to do?

Why an experiment of course!

From now till February, I have control of 100% of the cash that comes into this house. That means all of his money from the side jobs he does to keep busy, my money and our "weekly living allowance" as well. Until now he has been managing it himself and we are drowning. Yes, all of our bills are paid, but there is no money to actually live on the way it is right now.

So we are doing an experiment. Partly to show him that I'm fully capable of making a budget (done) and sticking to it and partly to find out if he can handle me handling the money. He's mentally ill, so we aren't sure how he will handle it being ME that tells him no when he really wants something.

If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and we'll know that before we make it legal.

We don't have much coming out, but as I figured it, we have roughly 160.00 in cash coming into the house each week. (note again: this does not include the money for the household bills, etc, this is just our living money.) We should have at least 30.00 a week left over, but for some reason we don't.

I've figured it out and I'm on it! LOL

As it stands it's my goal to save at least 100.00 in that 9 weeks. I'm adding a ticker to the top of the page to help track our progress. Please keep us in your prayers!

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