The good folks at CSNbaby.com offered to provide a guest post. I wrote about preparing for a baby’s arrival on a budget last year. That article was an overview of the monumental task of preparing for a baby’s arrival, which precedes an even more monumental task – preparing the baby. This post speaks specifically about decorating the nursery.

Nursery Decoration on a Budget

Let’s be honest, being charged with the task of decorating your child’s nursery is scary enough without having to worry about the costs involved. Most families are living on a tighter budget these days, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still supply your newborn with the nursery that they deserve. Hiring home decorators and buying new baby furniture can come with quite a hefty price tag. With a little creativity however, you can easily decorate your baby’s nursery by yourself for a fraction of the cost and surprisingly little effort.

One of the easiest ways to decorate a nursery is with some homemade or store bought stencils. With stencils, you can add some character to your child’s room without having to resort to expensive wallpaper. Wallpaper can be a real pain, especially if you’re installing it by yourself. By painting with stencils, even a dad with no artistic ability can create great looking wall art on for very little money. Stencils can usually be found at any art supply or crafts store and come in a variety of shapes and designs. Once you have your stencils, practice painting with them on a scrap of wood or drywall. Practice makes perfect and the better your painting skills, the less time and effort it will take to get your nursery walls looking just right.

When decorating your nursery walls you may be tempted to go with more traditional colors like pastels. While these colors are nice and give the room a nice tone, baby’s eyes are underdeveloped for the beginning stages of their lives and they have difficulty distinguishing soft colors. Be bold and paint your nursery with bright and vibrant colors! Not only will it make for a more interesting nursery, but your child will actually be able to see the designs which will make the room more engaging for your son or daughter. Simple tricks like these will help take the pain out of room decoration while also making the most of every last penny.

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I promised a personal finance post a long time ago. Here it is.

Frugal Dad recently wrote a post about having a sinking fund. I wasn’t familiar with the term, sinking fund, but I was aware of the concept long ago. For those of you joining me here out of context, a sinking fund is an amount of money set aside regularly to help fund irregular expenses.

In the past, whenever an irregular expense like the 6-month premium for my car insurance came due, I simply charged it. I told myself I would pay it off over time. I even gave myself extra credit, calculating the APR over the same time frame was still less than the inconvenience fee charged by the insurance company for making installment payments.

My financial health is trending upward, but I am still operating on  a cash basis.  Oh, I can get credit, but it’s hardly on favorable terms. The banks aren’t being very nice to people with good credit scores either these days. Since I am on a cash basis, I have to carefully plan for these irregular expenses.

I created a spreadsheet that helps you calculate how much of your monthly budget should go toward your sinking fund. It looks like most budgeting spreadsheets, but with additional columns. The additional columns are for quarterly, semi-annual, annual, and bi-annual expenses.

Like most people, I find it easier to look at money on a monthly basis. The biggest portion of our expenses occur at that interval. At the bottom of the spreadsheet, you’ll see a running tally of how much you need to put into your sinking fund each month. This is a fun spreadsheet to play around with. I can daydream and  run what-if scenarios all day with it.

Download the spreadsheet here.

You might notice the screen-shot above doesn’t look like Microsoft Office. With yet another frugal move, I started using Open Office. When Microsoft Office 2008 was released for the Mac, I asked myself if I should upgrade or do I jump ship for the open-source alternative? I asked myself, but my wallet chimed in before anyone else could speak.

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