It's been awhile

Wow, blogger has changed since I last posted.  And that was a while ago.  An entire pregnancy ago in fact.

A lot has changed around here.  The biggest change is that we welcomed a new little boy into our lives two weeks ago.  Wyatt joined his brothers and sisters on July 8th in a very, very, very quick labor.  Madeline, Owen and Ben are in love with their new brother and we are adjusting to our new normal around here.

In other news I changed jobs back in January.  I am working fewer hours and closer to home which is awesome.  There was a small pay cut but it was offset by the gas money we are saving.  I was driving 45 minutes to work twice a week before.  Now I mostly drive 5-10 minutes to work twice a week.  And I work with younger students which is awesome as well.

However changing jobs, bringing in a little less income, and adding to our family effects our budget.  While things are fine now, I want to do better than fine.  I want to add to our savings account without making it feel like we are living paycheck to paycheck. 

I want to start writing here again and hopefully doing that will help me hold myself accountable for keeping us on budget.  I will start with my current goal- our dishwasher died a few weeks ago.  Jon is great about fixing things around the house and has tried a few different things with the dishwasher but we are at the point where buying a new dishwasher is more cost effective.  We live in a state where they are discussing having a tax holiday in August.  So we will hold out for that before buying our dishwasher for two reasons.  One is to save the 6.25% tax that we would normally pay.  The other reason is that in the past the stores like to have giant sales on the tax holiday.  So we can potentially save even more money.  Right now in order to buy the dishwasher we would need to dig into savings.  That isn't a huge deal, after all that is what savings are for.  However it also isn't ideal.  I am not working for the summer (due to our new arrival) so we do not have my small income to offset Jon's salary.  To avoid digging into savings for the dishwasher money I am planning on having a tag sale the week end before the tax holiday.  My goal is to raise at least part, if not all, of the money necessary to pay for the dishwasher.  I do not know if this is possible, but I figure it cannot hurt.  I have started going through the house to purge some of the extra stuff we have (and don't need) and hopefully with it I will be able to put a small dent into the purchase price of our new dishwasher.

Now, how many items will I need to sell to raise the money I need for a new dishwasher?