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| Image: Matthew Henry |
As a major part of our blog, we want to share exactly how we budget and how we’re doing follow that budget. A lot of other financial material shares vague rules like spending no more than 33% of your income on housing, however many dollars per person per week for groceries, or whatever, but we want to show the actual amounts down to the dollar. For most categories, we roll over unused (or overused) amounts to the next month. This allows us to save responsibly and help account for month-to-month swings in things like gas and groceries.
Category
|
Monthly Budget
|
Amount left
|
Tithes/Charity
|
750
|
1573
|
Rent
|
1150
|
1150
|
Electric
|
65
|
144
|
Phone
|
10
|
4
|
Internet
|
35
|
-15
|
Groceries
|
230
|
47
|
Restaurants
|
120
|
103
|
Clothing
|
60
|
124
|
Cleaning/Laundry
|
10
|
127
|
Gas & Travel Expenses
|
135
|
-28
|
Repairs & Tires
|
120
|
100
|
Car Replacement
|
70
|
1410
|
Other Medical
|
80
|
-256
|
Entertainment
|
70
|
148
|
Vacation
|
70
|
-97
|
Rental Insurance
|
0
|
0
|
Auto Insurance
|
167
|
167
|
Toiletries
|
10
|
80
|
Cosmetics/Hair Care
|
15
|
45
|
Gifts
|
140
|
558
|
Furniture/ Household
|
75
|
363
|
Tyler Pocket Money
|
50
|
94
|
Nicole Pocket Money
|
50
|
198
|
Nicole Student Loan
|
197
|
4
|
Tyler Private Loan
|
322
|
1
|
Tyler Federal Loan
|
194
|
-3
|
Car Loan
|
1100
|
0
|
Miscellaneous
|
165
|
229
|
Fitness
|
5
|
303
|
Baby Things
|
50
|
32
|
Daughter’s Health Insurance
|
87
|
87
|
Water
|
40
|
153
|
Gas
|
70
|
48
|
Daycare
|
750
|
565
|
This is a mid-month look, which is why a few items (like Tithes/Charity, Daycare, and Auto Insurance) have a lot left. A few categories have a bunch built up, where we’ve been saving for a while. We’re hoping both of our cars will last quite a while, but we’re building up our car replacement fund so that we can buy a car with cash or at least have a very good down payment when we need a new one. For furniture and household, we actually just got a really good deal on some nice living room chairs on Craigslist, so that category is down to around $250 now.
We have a few categories we’re not happy with and need to work on. Our Other Medical category is running low because our FSA ran out earlier than expected this year. Gas and Travel is difficult to pin down. Our families live in another state, so trips to go see them really eat at our budget there. And vacation was built up, but we were just lucky enough to make a trip to a friend’s wedding into a mini-vacation for us and went a little over budget. We try to live conservatively enough that when we do go over we have a cushion in our bank account, and we can keep saving up. We’ll just have to take a little longer to save for our next trip.
Our biggest win in our budget, we think, is the car loan. As I had mentioned before, I was dumb, got too excited, and spent more on a car than I should have. By cutting back other areas, we were able to turn our $200/month car payment into a $1,100/month car payment, and now we should have it paid off in January, about 3 years ahead of schedule. Once that’s done, we’ll roll that entire payment into Nicole’s student loans (our next smallest balance) and start paying that off.
Budgeting is the single most important step to getting your finances where you want them to be. Don’t worry if your budget isn’t perfect the first month! It takes time to see what you spend and make the adjustments you need to make. But once you find the right budget, it keeps you from spending more than you make, and helps you reach your financial goals while still being able to spend money on the things that are important to you.
We know that keeping track of a budget is difficult. That’s why we’re currently working on v3 of our own budgeting software! This is a program that I wrote to help teach myself coding while I was unemployed a few years back, we’re starting from scratch to write a better program than the one we currently use at home. Keep checking back to see when it’s released!
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