After about 5 hours of budget deliberations, we now have a budget. It's an ambitious budget, and it will get us nowhere near a 9k savings in a couple of months, but it is a bit more realistic than my original thoughts. Funny how hard data can bring clarity.
Our bank has a great application that allows you to categorize your expenses and download all kinds of charts and graphs. If everything would just categorize automatically it would be perfect, but we do need to go in and mark some things that aren't clear to an automated system.
It's through this program that I found out that I earn 15% of our household income. Depressing, right. 20% of our income goes to the mortgage, but lately 40% of our budget has gone to travel. Just as I was about to nix the travel fund for the next few months, Gerd reminded me that his annual trip to Germany for his grandmother's and mother's birthdays is coming up next month.
So we're cutting back on food. Let me tell you, food is EXPENSIVE in Boston. I'm allowing us $100 for dining out in a month, $100 each for our own monthly personal spending (like lunches or whatever), $200 for groceries, and $100 for a mad cash fund for unexpected things that come up.
Today was the first spending day, and it was much, much harder than I thought it would be. I've already spent $22 of my $25 for the week going to dinner with a friend. We had a groupon or it would have been twice as expensive. I went grocery shopping and spent $44 for the week, but I have about $10 worth of groceries yet to buy!
Gerd has already complained that $100 a month won't be enough for him. He's going to lunch with former coworkers of his on Wednesday and seems to think he'll go over budget by the end of this week.
Well, it IS an extreme budget, but we're trying to save up a bunch of money. I guess we'll see how it goes over the next week or so. Crazy to be on such a tight budget when our combined salary seems so high...but we really want that fireplace. So save we will. Wish us luck :)
2 comments:
Fun fun fun.
We used to use MS Money for budgeting and financial tracking, but it became a pain after a while. Dumb program thought it knew better than our bank on some things and was always missing or doubling the automatic payments and basically was never correct. I think hubby is still annoyed at me for throwing in the towel there as he and Money got a long much better.
These days we(I) do a lot of budgeting in Excel. Plain old spreadsheets. We can download our account history into .csv (spreadsheet-friendly) format from the bank's website to look at actuals, and I've set up a few spreadsheets where I can plug in different scenarios and play with numbers (with or without tuition, with or without new house, with or without car, etc). And I know all the mortgage/loan-related macros and parameters by heart now :)
It sounds like you guys have set a tight budget on food, but even back while we were kid-less, we spent a lot on entertaining and cooking fancy stuff (usually for friends, which doubled or tripledt he fancy-stuff cost). Probably way more than we should have since I think we had months 8 years ago where we spent as much on food as we do now feeding 2 more mouths.
Good luck on all your house projects. I still need to come out and visit at some point and I'd love to see all the work you're doing :) Maybe in the fall after we've gotten moved....
Good luck! And think thrifty thoughts :)
There was a point where we were spending more on entertaining, food, and dining, than I earned my first year out of college. We eat (ate) out A LOT. I mean, it's Boston, and we were living in the South End (which is known for its restaurants...) If we weren't eating out we were going to Fromaggios to buy cooking stuff and spending $50 every trip...homemade pizza...$50, spaghetti with meat sauce...$50. I just wanted to see if we could manage on a much tighter budget.
As for the money program, so far I love it. I also do my budgeting in Excel, but I can track actual expenditures between our 5 separate accounts (don't get me started). The only problem I've had so far is that $ that comes out of our joint account gets counted twice, which I think will be a quick fix if I ever get around to changing the settings. Right now I just have to delete one of the entries (which isn't difficult since we don't actually use our joint account much...again, don't get me started).
We might make our food budget this month, but we won't make the eating out budget...I forgot to include the fact that it's our anniversary and I've planned a really nice local foods dinner for the evening. http://www.seldelaterre.com/back-bay/events.php Who knows though, perhaps we'll come close :)
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