All set to various times.

No excuse for oversleeping.

You are late if you are not 5 minutes early.

Wind your clock, set your alarms and DAMN, it was one of the TWO time changes in 365 days.

these units program themselves. Atomic clocks. GDG tells you what time it is. Go get them at Wal Mart.

No, No excuse to be late. Even your cell phone can be an alarm.

My damn cat is an alarm clock. As soon as the son starts to rise he is on my face, wanting me to get up and let him go prowling outdoors.

At the very least, Megan should embark on a crash course on sales. there are many books available. Join Toastmasters. Find successful salespeople who are willing to mentor you.

And if the main “selling” you are supposed to do is to get other people to join the company, run as far and as fast as you can.

I live in Greece, so my rule is grow what you can’t buy. Thus I grow acorn squash but not eggplant.

With my second, I was able to do half-and-half, so we saved some money on formula, but he is lactose intolerant, so he’s on formula way past the age when most kids move to milk (unanticipated expense).

Oh, and my second was born with a problem with his eye which necessitated immediate surgery, multiple hospital visits, a trip every month or so that costs about $80 just for the transit (public transit, since 1. we don’t have a car and 2. the appointments are always set so that we’d be driving at rush hour into big cities) to a special clinic (there’s only one that we can get to and back in the same day), plus the co-pay for the treatment (and we have EXCELLENT coverage) is around $1000 this year. And this is a relatively MINOR problem, believe it or not.

Having kids isn’t cheap, and the expenses are totally unpredictable. If you don’t have a good emergency fund and you’re not prepared to face whatever hits you, you’re not prepared to be a parent – not that anyone ever is, but if you can’t handle a bit of financial turbulence, you’re in trouble.

Nothing shows you just how unprepared you are to be a parent as having to sign consent forms for your 4-week-old to undergo general anesthesia…

#8 @Ryan: I didn’t play any sports or participate in any afterschool activities that required extra payments that I couldn’t make myself. I took the school bus to school every day through graduation. My school didn’t have prom or homecoming, but I strongly suspect that my parents would have made me pay my own way out of babysitting money had I had one.

In my day (in my school, at least) , everyone wore clothes from the Gap & Banana Republic. The only item I ever owned from the Gap was a graduation gift from my boyfriend’s parents. (a duffel bag). Still waiting for something from Banana Republic, though they’re scheduled to open one where I live quite soon. My clothes came from tj maxx, deb, wal-mart, caldor (I’m dating myself…), and one curious shop where every item was $19.99 or less. I think it was called Grand Larceny. I went to a smallish high school (500 students), and yet I still had friends despite having the “wrong” clothes.
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If your teens are spending you into the hole, you might be teaching them the wrong values, and you might need to re-evaluate what you’re doing with them. Of course, if all your clothes are name-brand, they’ll expect just as much.

As a senior in high school, I’m positive that teenagers are way more expensive than babies and small children.

Sports are more expensive. Add in costs like a car, gas, insurance, and maintenance. Plus expenses like prom and homecoming. College application fees. School fees are more because of more advanced classes. The expectation of wearing nice, brand name clothes. Etc.

If someone is concerned about being a parent, I’d tell them to save up for high school and not to worry so much about the 1st 12 years.

It is really fun to exchange the strange vegetables with other gardeners. We mostly just grow heirloom vegetables so we can harvest the seeds and exchange them with other people.

Also, is there any way you could do this business part-time while still working at your other job to see how it really goes?

I’m not saying you can’t do well, but I think you will find that there are a lot of unexpected expenses at the beginning that you didn’t foresee, and it will take a while to get to where you need to be financially even if it goes fairly well.

Also, what I have heard for budgeting unpredictable income is to make a list of all your expenses and prioritize them in order. At the top you obviously have vital things like food, shelter, transportation. At the bottom are things you can do without if you have to. As the money comes in you budget the bills in order. So maybe in a lower month you had “new shoes” or “going out to dinner” at the bottom of the list and if your money is gone before you get to that item you don’t buy them, you wait till another month. And as Trent said when you have a really good month, you put aside the surplus to use for those lower income months.

Also, I agree with lurker carl that we should not continue with the “spring forward fall back” time change. A few states have already stopped doing that. I’ll be if we had a national vote, the overwhelming majority would agree to just choose a time, and stick to it.

Commission only sales is really tough. My husband is paid commission but he gets a base draw against commission. He also has extended medical benefits from his employer (dental, prescriptions, etc.) in addition to MSP (we live in Canada) and they pay a portion of his cell bill. If he has a bad month (or several) that draw has to eventually be paid back when he has a better month or months. In a case like this, we do know the minimum amount he will get. Plus, he’s been in sales for years (more than a decade) and has a large number of regular accounts. With all of that we had a really bad year or year and a half where he was sick repeatedly and where they had made some sort of calculation error previously that meant for over a year he got basically the base draw amount. It was not fun. It meant we were down about $10k from what he makes in an average year.

It sounds to me as though you are going to receive straight commission with no draw. Since your husband’s salary alone doesn’t cover all your expenses, it means you have *no* safety net. And sales are not easy. Most people are not cut out for sales; they’re order takers.

You don’t say what you are selling, although from the way it’s worded I would be unsurprised to find that it is some type of multi-level marketing business. If so, that means you have some kind of monthly financial commitment of money that you will be putting into the business (either as product you’ll use yourself or product you purchase on spec, hoping to resell it).

What you need to do right now is to sit down and crunch all the numbers, including how much you’ll be putting into the business (if applicable). See just how far in the red you’ll be if you make no sales at all. Add at least $100 to that amount (there will always be unexpected small business expenses) and then figure out how much you have to sell in a month to make the total amount.

So, if you’re going to be $500 in the hole, add $100 and figure out how much commission you have to make per day. $600 divided by 22 average work days per month is $27.27 per day. You may say that’s easy peasy. But how much will you have to *sell* in order to make that much commission? That depends on how much the percentage is! If you make 15% commission, you’ll be in the black (just barely) if you sell $185/day. Do the math.

Then, when you start selling, keep referring yourself back to your magic number to make sure you sell that minimum amount at least each and every day.

Give yourself at least 3 months to really learn the product(s), the business, how to sell, etc. Then evaluate. How are you doing? Are you breaking even or making money? Are you improving from month to month? Or do you need to find something else to do?

Good luck!

I hate the “spring ahead” and “fall back” time changes, making the adjustment gets harder as I get older. I wish we could stick to the same time all year long.