Most of you know that James and I took Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace class last year.  For a full year, we’ve been working hard on doing a budget every month–right down to the last dollar–a zero-based budget is what it’s called.  Typically, I work on the budget for about an hour at the beginning of the month and then a few times throughout the month to keep track of things as we go and make sure nothing is out of whack.  Our budget changes drastically each month, because I own my own business.  Normal things are the same–our mortgage payment, car insurance, life insurance, gas and electric, cell phone/internet bill, etc.  We have student loan payments that stay the same, and also we’re working on paying off our final credit card.  But there are things that adjust every month, and it gets incredibly tricky.  Add in a planned maternity leave, and things get even stickier.  See, the problem is first off, that as a teacher (and I’m not sure why James’s school district does this), James doesn’t get paid during the two summer months.  Some districts give their teachers a “lump check” as their last paycheck to cover their July and August.  True, this means that their paychecks during the school year are less, but I think it makes it easier to budget your year if you know you the same amount of money coming in each month.  So, strike one working against us–no paycheck for two full months.  What does this mean?  It means that we have to put away a quarter of his pay each of the ten months in order to save for the two months that he doesn’t get paid.  Super hard.  The second problem with our current situation is that to be honest, I have absolutely no idea month in and month out what I will be making that month.  Literally, I can’t even make educated guesses.  You can imagine how tricky this is for budget planning as well.  I can sit down for an hour and look at the month that lies ahead and figure out how much money we will need to cover everything that’s going on–but knowing if it will actually get “covered” is another story completely.  One that I won’t know until the end of the month.

And finally, planning a full 3.5 months of maternity leave during the busiest time of a photographer’s season?  Well, that’s the final straw.  It’s laughable to even try to guess what’s going to happen between now and September.  We’ve been trying the best we can to save–but then to throw another stick on the fire, we actually haven’t heard yet how much we are going to owe in taxes, so I’m not even sure how much of our saving fund will be going toward that yet.  Moral of the story–well, you can try to prepare all you want, but if you have a husband who gets paid for only ten months and during those other two months, you will be on maternity leave not making any money, planning can only get you so far.  Trusting in God to get you through and trying to be wise in the meantime is the only way to do it, I suppose!