Thanks for the welcome and encouragement.

My "mood" icon reflects the fact that my head is spinning right now.

I started out Saturday morning meaning to spend no more than 1-1/2 hours a day dealing with financial stuff. I need to work on it, but I'm tired of money worries dominating my life. The thing is, after I got started I could see how much I needed to do and how much time it's going to take. 1-1/2 hours a day would hardly make a dent.

Here's what I've worked on so far:

1) Went through all stacks of paper to make sure all bills were found and paid, and all spending recorded in Quicken. Decided I have to record spending every single day, or no system is going to work.

2) Worked on a cash flow spreadsheet I made up in Quattro (like Excel) to plan out how to stay in the black each month. Panicked! As things stand now, there isn't enough money left to cover emergencies like car repairs, assuming they will come to what they did last year--let alone "extras" like new clothes. And if our cc minimum payment goes up (as is predicted to happen to everyone later this year), I'll need to find still more money.

3) Dropped the voicemail service from the phone company, and the wiring protection plan we'd signed up for when we were remodeling. Switched to just Call Forwarding on Busy, so when I'm online calls will be sent to my cell phone (it has free voice mail). Savings, $9 a month or $108 a year.

4) Downgraded our cable service from expanded basic to limited basic at $10 a month. Savings, $40 a month or $480 a year.

5) Worked on our food and sundries budget, intensely! There are some interesting charts the government puts out that show what the average household spends on groceries, supplies, "food not at home", and so forth. They show it all different ways, by area of the country, size of household, income level, etc. So I looked at what we've been spending vs. what the typical family in our situation would be spending, and finally made up a new budget.

6) Started setting up my new budget tracking gadget for June. It's called Budgetmap. It's supposed to go in your checkbook like a register, but it folds out and has colums for 12 budget categories. Decision One: It's rather thick to keep in my checkbook, which is incorporated in my wallet. Plus when I'd have to fold out the pages to write on, it would give me a really lumpy surface. So I'm keeping it separate, with a rubber band around it.

7) Lookiing into cheaper car insurance, and am finding a Catch-22 situation. Apparently insurance companies are using your credit rating now to set your rate--better credit rating=lower insurance rates. To up my score a bit, I'd like to take money out of savings and pay down our one cc so the balance is less than 1/2 of our available credit. But then I wouldn't have much cash left to pay on the new policy. So I kind of feel like I can't afford to apply for cheaper insurance quite yet. At least after comparing rates on the state insurance dept's website, I know which companies I want to pursue.