Week 1 - Budget, Planner, Meal Planning & Putting the Holidays to Bed

I figured the first place I needed to start to get really organized and get my crap together was with my finances and time management, two of my enemies.  I looked around for some good systems that may (or may not) work for me and some free printables to make my own binders as cheap as possible to get started.  I also wanted to add putting away the Christmas decorations to this week's challenge so it gets done.

So, here is the system I'm going to attempt use.

Budget Binder:
Materials:
Cheap plastic 3-ring binder - 88 cents
A 3-ring zipper pouch - less than $1
A calculator - less than $1
Dividers - 88 cents
Free printables online/made own Excel spreadsheet

My first divider is Budget, which holds Monthly Budget Worksheets you can print for free at blog.jennimullinix.com. 

Then I have my checklist.  It's just an excel worksheet I made and printed similar to what I was already using and saving on the computer; I just made it a little prettier.  It's just a list of the monthly bills and a place to mark off when they were paid for the month and how much/when to make sure nothing gets missed. 

The next section is "Cash Check-In."  This is new to me.  I NEVER use cash and never have cash on me.  I want to try the cash envelope system and see how that works for us. The purpose would be to allocate a certain amount to gas, groceries, spending, etc., per week, and when you go to run that errand you take the cash allotted for it.  When you run out of the cash for that category for the week, it's gone.  There is no debit card or "borrowing" cash from another category.  This may very well be the discipline needed.  The Cash Check-In free printable can be found at iHeart Organizing blog. 

And the the last two sections are check registers for each bank account.  You can also find the free check register at iHeart Organizing.


Planner:
Cheap plastic 3-ring binder - 88 cents
Dividers - 88 cents
Free printables online
For the planner, I just really needed something to keep me more organized with time management and focused on the things I want to get done 'today' as well as a weekly and monthly planner to keep up with therapy appointments, soccer functions and other things we have going on.

The first section I made "Daily."  I found a "Planning My Day" free printable at Just a Girl and Her Blog. It's going to be great, I think.  At the top it has a To Do List.  Then it is has a Contact section and To Buy section for calls you need make or emails and things you need to buy.  Then it is a Time Blocking section with the clock hours and everything listed in your To Do and of course your shopping trip and time to make calls should all be included in the time blocking section.

The next two sections are Weekly and Monthly and these were free printables (so pretty with a quote for each month and a note section for each week), which can be found on the Handmade Home.net. 

The next section is a grocery shopping list.  (Free printable found at Just a Girl and Her Blog - see link above.)  There's a little menu planning section on this page.

I would like to insert a section here more about meal planning, I think.

The very last section is Projects.  I printed out a free Room Organization Planner that seems like it will be very useful.  I got it at Gifts We Use.

As for Christmas decorations..well, I have not started putting anything away, but I have decided to throw some away and got a few new ornaments on sale 75% off so I could get rid of those dreadful ornament balls.  Shatterproof??  Yeah right.  Not with my 4-year-old