Alex and I LOVE budgeting. We have found that creating a budget and sticking to it has been both eye opening and freeing. Many people view budgeting as a constraint. However, we found that budgeting liberated us to make conscious, informed decisions about how we spend our hard earned cash. We experience less guilt, less "buyer's remorse", and less hesitation to buy the things that we know we need. We can be generous with gifts, intentional with splurges, and frugal when we can. While I could say many, many things about budgeting, I will begin by listing our monthly budget, and a breakdown of last month's purchases so you can see it in action.
Our Budget
Fixed Expenses
Rent/Utilities: $0 (Gracious family members)
*We do track our utility usage and will make a payment every 6 months for our electricity since we use electric for heat, cooking, and AC. So far this year, we have spent $141 on electricity. That's less than $15 a month.)
Laundry: $12 ($1 per load)
Internet: $67 (We pay for the Big House's internet, too).
Cell phone: $80
Retirement contribution: $150
Variable Expenses
Gas: $100
Entertainment: $110
Groceries: $400
Home Improvement: $75
Baby Supplies: $20
Hobbies: $115
Korie's Personal: $40
Alex's Personal: $20
Discretionary $35+
*This is where we put overflow from any category. If we consistently go over in an area, we know that either our behavior or our budget needs to be adjusted. We also add "extra" money to this area of our budget. Alex and I both do various work on the side that brings in an extra $20-50 per month.
May Spending
Our fixed expenses remained the same, so I'll post the breakdown for the variable areas only.
Gas: $98/100
Entertainment: $107/110 All of this was spent on restaurants, coffee, and ice cream!
Hobbies: $74/114 Alex spent this on jujitsu and aquaponics.
Home Improvement: $72/75 We bought new lights, charge cords, and outlets.
Baby Supplies: $26/20 We had rollover from the previous month. I got Abel summer clothes.
Korie's Personal: $11/40 I bought two e-books.
Alex's Personal: $9/20 He bought jeans.
Discrerionary: $50/245 We have quite a bit extra stored in here now. I splurged on a cute, versatile dress because I have several events to attend this summer, and still don't quite fit into my pre-baby clothes.
Miscellaneous: May happens to be when we got our tax return, so we used that money for some bonuses that we don't have built into the budget. $280 on plane ticket to see my grandma, $260 on gifts because it is wedding and graduation season, and $600 on new cell phones for Alex and I.
In a typical month, we put away about $2000 in savings because we are in "save as much as possible" mode. The minimum we want to save each month is $1000. We don't keep a budget for gifts and vacations and things like that; we just take them out of savings. Because we are in a season of life when we are making a surplus amount of money, we are comfortable using our discretion to splurge in those areas.
So, that's what our