I really don't believe budgets in the traditional sense. One because I have a wife and kids and they really pay attention to the budget. To be fare my wife does care and if good with money. She has never carried a balance on credit cards and had zero debt when we met. She does like to buy things for herself and the family with no thought toward a budget. So I treat a budget like I treat diets. Knowing what you eat if 80% of the battle to fixing your eating issues. I use myFitnessPale to track meals. This is a nice program to easily input what you eat and automatically sync with a lot of health apps like Apple watch(health).
Your spending and income can be tracked the exact same way. Programs like Personal Finance or Mint are a couple of free sites that you can use to see your spending. These tools are also great to check from any fraudulent activity on your accounts. I spend maybe an hour throughout the week to put things into the correct categories. Every few months I look at the nice graphs to see trends and helps me realize we are spending way to much on food or clothing. Once you know the better you can adjust your life to save more.
For those of us with someone who has a hard time sticking to a budget; setting automatic withdraws as soon as your paycheck is deposited will help. I put money need for bills into a checking account. Then siphon off everything else into an online saving, taxable investments(Vanguard), and IRA accounts. This way it looks like we have less money to spend each month. Simple life hack if you don't see it you can't spend it.
Instead of a budget I choose to track my spending and see were the money is going. Then looking at this helps me determine where we want to go as a family. As I said in a previous post we are going to focus on our food budget for the next couple of months. In MINT I put in a budget to use as a goal we are trying to hit each month. Sometimes I wish budgets were like a balloons in the house. Once it reaches the ceiling it stops.
My budget includes my both mine and my wife's income. We are a team we spend money together and make money together. I break down the Expenses by Loan, Essentail, and Discretionary
Loan are expenses that will send and could remove if needed
Essential are the expenses you can't do without
Discretionary are the expense we can work on to lower our expenses. This is where all the fun is.
For income I track
To help me track where we are and if we are on the correct path I put these in Google sheets and will add a new column for 2020 and beyond.
It was a big shock to see the yearly totals for these categories. I feels like we live frugally, but looking at my numbers we have a ways to go. I'm hoping by the end of the year we can get our month expenses down by $2,000.00.
It it was easy then everyone would be FI.
Instead of a budget I choose to track my spending and see were the money is going. Then looking at this helps me determine where we want to go as a family. As I said in a previous post we are going to focus on our food budget for the next couple of months. In MINT I put in a budget to use as a goal we are trying to hit each month. Sometimes I wish budgets were like a balloons in the house. Once it reaches the ceiling it stops.
My budget includes my both mine and my wife's income. We are a team we spend money together and make money together. I break down the Expenses by Loan, Essentail, and Discretionary
Loan are expenses that will send and could remove if needed
Essential are the expenses you can't do without
Discretionary are the expense we can work on to lower our expenses. This is where all the fun is.
For income I track
To help me track where we are and if we are on the correct path I put these in Google sheets and will add a new column for 2020 and beyond.
It was a big shock to see the yearly totals for these categories. I feels like we live frugally, but looking at my numbers we have a ways to go. I'm hoping by the end of the year we can get our month expenses down by $2,000.00.
It it was easy then everyone would be FI.
