Although I don’t formally practice all of the principles of Dave Ramsey, I do believe in his concepts. One of those is spending every penny before the month starts. Of course, you can’t do that if you don’t have a budget.
Last year, I bought a Bill Organizer from a fall fundraiser that my son’s school sponsored. I thought I had it all figured out until I actively started using this portfolio. Seeing who we were paying, when and how much – written down every month – really opened my eyes to what was going out on a recurring basis.
For families, summer often brings different expenses. During the month of May, I took the opportunity to look at how things would change and what adjustments I could make to pad our emergency fund. Since the accident, I’m so glad that I did … it really saved us from scrambling around!
Last night, I looked at the budget again setting things up for the fall. The kids will return to daycare, extracurricular activities begin again, and things will change again. It’s nice to have things lined out so that I can be prepared in advance.
More than anything, though, it gives me a chance to see what expenses can be cut out. Now that I’ve been doing this (pretty intensely) for over a year, there isn’t much left to cut. But, for example, it gave me a chance to look at the couple of goodies that we still enjoy … Netflix, for example. We’re on the 1 disc at a time plan. Although we don’t use the disc service much, the kids use the Instant Streaming to the Wii everyday. It costs around $10/month, but because these movies are available to us at any time – it’s kept us from buying a lot of DVDs to entertain the kids. We use it all the time, so I chose to keep it.
If you are interested in really seeing where your money is going, I recommend starting with the web-based program “Mint.com“. You enter your account information and it tracks your spending. By using the category feature, it allows you to be very in-depth with your transactions. I used the program for a month and then printed a report to see if my written budget matched what I was actually spending. It can be eye opening, trust me!
Any tips that you’d like to share are welcome. The best learning when it comes to budgeting, I think, comes from those that are doing it too! Leave a comment … let’s learn from each other!
