Clinical nurse specialist and food entrepreneur: Our budget and planning for our future

I'm Alden Egen, I'm a clinical nurse specialist, and I make $125,000 a year. And I'm Peter Egan, I own AgStandard Almonds, and last year, I made $36,000. I would say I feel financially secure. Did have a very interesting year in the last year, in 2015, I graduated and got a new job where I made a little bit more money, but at the same time, Peter started his business only a few months after that, and we had a baby, so a lot of things were changing in the last year. I was doing the bills, I was going through looking at everything, and was like, ooh, this is only gonna work for like one more month. I mean, we had savings, we weren't going into it blind, we're, I mean, fairly financially savvy, we were saving some of our money, we were planning for the kid, just the things got added up and compounded, and one thing here, a little thing there, and then, I would say four, five months in, realized, it switched from, how are we gonna maintain this, to, things have gotta change, and we have to start planning. To me, the most important part of dealing with a situation like that is being aware, knowing that it's happening, and recognizing what's happened, like, we don't do anything fancy, we don't use any apps, that sort of thing, we have an Excel spreadsheet, and then, it's only a couple fields, we have what's coming in, and then we have everything that's going out, and when that adds up to be a negative number two months in a row, three months in a row, four months in a row, and you're not changing your behavior, you can only assume that it's gonna happen the next month and the next month, so we start looking for ways, and the biggest difference was, there wasn't an immediate change, all of a sudden, we had to plan these changes six months in advance, whereas, in the past, just the two of us working, no kids, we would just make an adjustment, we would see something, and a week later, it would be fixed, we'd said, "Oh, well, we went out to eat too much this month," and we're just like, okay, well then next month we didn't go out to eat. The logic behind that is not the same as when you're changing your rent, and you're changing your childcare, there's definitely an emotional attachment to childcare, where, ever if you know it's wrong, you don't necessarily wanna change it, 'cause you're doing whatever you can in the best interest of baby Luke, so it's not, oh, we're just gonna slash childcare, it was like, he's one, what else are we gonna do? We loaned ourselves about $2,000 a month for the course of five months, and then in that time, decided that we were going to lower our childcare cost by 25%, and move to not a drastically different part of the city, but adjust the living expenses to where our living expenses are gonna go down almost 40%. So, not only, yes we did use debt to gap those five months, but with the expenses saved at the end, there's a clear path to repaying that. So together, our combined monthly net is $8,500. Our monthly expenses, our rent is $2,350, base rent, that includes parking, we lucked out, our gas and electric is $125, more or less, internet and TV, internet is $80, and then movie streaming is $10, everybody does that, our phone is, for the two of us, is $200, car plus insurance is, the car's $350, we have a loan on that, and our insurance is about $350 as well. Alden's student loan is $500, mine is $250, monthly food, like grocery expenses, are $400, and then onto our recurring expenses, our childcare is $1,400 per month, and that's somebody coming into our home to take care of Luke. Monthly diapers and baby care is about $90, gym membership is $150, meals out is about $100, girls' night is $50 once a month, and then travel is a big expense, since we've had the baby, every holiday, or at least quarterly, we're traveling somewhere, so we budget about $500 per month for that, even though we're only traveling roughly quarterly. So that leaves $1,595, the plan is for the next six or seven months, put that directly back to the line of credit we took out in order to get ourselves positive, and after that, we'll go back to saving, and we'll go from there. We'll probably have another kid and start over again. My realistic financial goals are to get to keep doing what I'm doing. It's expensive to start a business, I've made a good start, the hard part it's not over, so I would like to continue to have the opportunity to see where that takes, the long-term value, in my predictions, will start to realize themselves year three, year four, so I still have another year or two of minimal salary and working as much as possible. My financial goal would be to get out of debt. I find a lot of peace living without any major debt, and knowing you can easily afford your monthly expenses based on your income. We would also like to start saving for Luke's future, for a college fund, specially given the cost of college right now, and maybe have him be able to start out in a place where there's a clean slate, and not starting in debt.