more…

It’s been nearly seven years that Andrea and I have been married.   We have always agreed upon a budget and tried to stick to it, but inevitably had a difficult time reconciling spending between the two of us and agreeing on what mattered.   On top of that, we always did monthly budgets.   By the time we got to the middle of the month we could tell we were a little over in food… but way under in other stuff and we would chinch as much as we thought was reasonable and try to “make the month.”  Then we’d go to reconcile something and forget that THAT receipt was food and THAT one was supplies.   Oh.  Splitting receipts.   Quickbooks.   Writing stuff down.   Doing stuff online.    We couldn’t agree on a method for keeping up with stuff or what was appropriate.

I realized as I was looking at the things that we often fought about (not enough in the food budget, how do we split bills, how do I know how much is left, this month is a long month) that there were really 4 different things we were budgeting : Giving, Savings, Bills, and General Expenses.  Giving was non-negotiable and we had it set up to deduct from our accounts.   Savings was often “what we had left over.”  Bills (Mortgage, Phone, Insurance, etc) were pretty predictable.   This one tiny part at the end “General Expenses” were the biggest source of our frustration.  I pondered it for a while and there are certain things that are unique about General Expenses.

They are:

1. daily, not monthly
2. different every single month
3. hardest to “keep track of” especially when you deal with multiple family members doing the purchases and multiple categories per store.

Given those unique properties, I came to the conclusion that all of our general expenses could really be lumped into one big pot.   How well we manage our food and gas spending SHOUDL affect how much we could spend on entertainment and supplies.   And groceries work MUCH better on a “weekly” basis than on a monthly one.   It is easy to plan for 7 days and shop with what you know you have or don’t have.   So we decided to give ourselves a weekly ALLOWANCE which all of our “General Spending” would come from.  It is deposited every Friday into the spending account.   If we save a little one week, we have more the next.  If we need to use more, we can pay from our main account and then schedule payments every week from the spending account to make up the difference over time, penalizing us a little each week until we get back on top of things.

And you know what?  For this month it has worked surprisingly well.   We’ve paid for everything we needed out of that allowance, which is actually LOWER than all of our budgets per month last year and yet, we know we’re staying on.   We are putting nearly twice as much into cash savings now and I’m not worried about it being needed.  We’re making good decisions, and we get to use a debit card and see our transactions posted within a few hours, so every night we know hos much we have left between now and the end of the week.   (Now, Dave Ramsey suggests using cash only, but that really doesn’t work for us since the envelope is ONE place and the person who can get the items on the way home from work is at ANOTHER place.  Some kind of debit/credit system was needed. )

We’ll see how it goes for the rest of the year, but it is at the very least a great breakthrough for our family to finally have not only a budget, but one that we a great chance of sticking with!