Creating Kris ~ a young mom blogs…

new resources on YM: baby budgets

When I was a young single mom-to-be, I planned ahead for the days of caring for my little one. I was lucky to find an apartment in a good neighbourhood that was not too terribly expensive and still clean and safe. From there, it was a matter of sticking to the basics as well as making use of lots and lots of hand-me-downs, food cupboard supplies, and second-hand-store purchases. I created regular budgets to keep track of my spending.

I’m surprised it’s taken until now to realize how useful sharing these budgets on the Young Mommies site would be, but better late than never! One thing I hear often from young women who are just finding out they are pregnant is “How much will this baby cost exactly?“.

I realize the cost of living has changed since 1998! but a lot of the general estimates are still roughly the same. Especially with baby gear – you can always spend as much as you want on that stuff and there are options ranging from “free” to “$500″ for almost each thing, whether it’s a crib or dresser or travel system, etc.

So what I did was update and transfer over 2 of my old budgets…

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tax return as a small business

So, time to share some important “mompreneur” info…

… file it away for next year’s “tax time”!

This year was the first year that I filled my taxes as a small business owner. And I really wish I’d not been so overwhelmed by the idea before! I feel the advantages definitely outweigh the disadvantages and it was easier than I thought.

There are many things you can claim if you are self-employed, including:

* a portion of your home space
* a portion of the costs of running your home (keep those electricity, water, and heating bills handy!)
* a portion of your internet and phone line costs

If there are things you need to buy to run your business, keep the receipts (and/or run them through a flatbed scanner) because you can claim those against your income as well. I actually wish I’d saved *more* of my receipts because I only managed to chip away a few hundred dollars off my income. Still did not need to pay any taxes, but I could’ve taken a larger chunk out of the amount of my income that went towards reducing my spouse’s taxes.

These business expenses can be things like office supplies (paper, folders, writing supplies, printer ink, labels, etc.) or things that you use to create your products (cardstock and ribbon, photo splits, etc.). And of course any membership or registration costs (such as the first-time business registration I paid last year to make KStar Design an official little company) count as well.

I don’t think I’ve ever remembered to post a picture of my home office, even though I took one a long time ago! Here’s my new little spot in our upstairs “4th bedroom”:

It still needs a lot of setting up (and I think may actually be messier now than in the picture, taken 1 month after we moved in last summer), but it’s coming along well and everything I need very often is at my fingertips. It’s a huge step up from our old office basement and I really feel very motivated when I’m in there to get as much work done as I can in the short times I’m able to attempt to do all those magical things that used to come so easily when I was able-bodied (sit up, focus, have a decent posture, not be distracted by pain, etc). I still have some hope when it comes to making my online work count for something, one way or another.

Signing off for now, your small-business-savvy “mompreneur”!

Mother’s Day blinkies and more!

This is one holiday I’ve got the jump on this year!

I actually ended up creating about 42 blinkies after putting together a cute new set of bases with purple gradients… using it for Mother’s Day blinkies, wedding blinkies, graduation blinkies, boyfriend/fiance/hubby/partner blinkies, and others. It just goes to show you how far one little starting design can leap!

You can find the new Mother’s Day blinkies (along with the other ones already in that collection), on this page.

This style of blinkie can be found added to these categories of regular-sized blinkies:

“Together for x years” Blinkies
“I Love my partner/hubby/BF” Blinkies
Engagement Blinkies
Month of Marriage Blinkies

Also, my work in getting my Wedding-type blinkies more modernized has also turned my attention towards my wedding-themed stores (that I’d kind of left to fend for themselves a couple years back). For some reason, the store provider changed their graphics style and any transparent graphics were now showing up as having BLACK backgrounds! Not so nice-looking on white merchandise. I’ve revamped and re-uploaded the graphics so they all show up nicely on T-shirts, hands, and the like. My Brideswear and Coupleswear Stores are therefore back in business.

We’ll see if I manage to find the time to update all the others … but I wouldn’t count on it. I’d really like to update the YM stores, but then again I’d really like the time to do EVERYTHING that I’m super behind on… My chronic pain has been quite severe for the past few months and I’ve had to catch some extra sleep almost every day for 1-3 hours! Pathetic I know, but I just can’t seem to function well without it (if I skip my morning “nap”, I’m just totally dead after dinner and I would not usually the one cooking it on those nights). Anyways, I digress. All that to say that I do really hope to get more of my online work done someday, but I have very all-encompassing health reasons why this is not easy to do.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great week!