Thursday, August 21, 2008

Hell is freezing over

I have always been against budgets.
In a way.
We have x amount of money we transfer to the "Green" account for bills and monthly expenses.
Then the other money is another account for business etc.

I have always been scared because we have never made a lot of money and when we have tried to make a budget it didn' t work on paper, so I would stress about how we would pay for everything.

Well I have had it on my heart to really pay attention to WHERE the money is going.
Lately I have noticed more being spent on this and that than on bills or savings, SOOOO I knew I needed to do something.

Well I noticed a category thing on my online banking and it is AWESOME.
I can type in what the budget amount for x category is per month , and then it will tell me what percentage I have spent toward that category on any given day.
I do have to update the categories daily or whenever the transaction has processes, so I will have to keep up with that!

But I am going to TRY!

Any bits of advice you have learned or practice would be appreciated!

5 comments:

Wendy said...

UGH! I am sooo bad at budgeting. Maybe because we never have enough money...hmm!! Good luck to you and I hope that this all works out for you guys.

Mrs. Stam said...

My husband is taking care of the money issue! I don't know how much we have or how stuff is getting paid LOL

I don't own any either so I have to ask him and he decide if and how much I could have for this and that!!!

My job on the other hand is making sure the house stuff is done (laundry. food.clean up etc....)

I think is a fair deal cause budgeting does makes me too anxious!!!!

amy said...

we do the envelope system. every month, we take out x ammount of money and divey it up into categories. then we take the cash from the particular category we are going to spend. if we run out of a certain category, we can just be done for the month or dip into another category. the only thing we don't use cash for is gas or unexpected things (car repair, ect)

this works really well to curb spending - which we need to do with only mike working now.

Bek said...

we have been working the budge since jan. my advice is it takes time and patience - don't give up right away - we are really still getting used to it. its hard work, but well worth the satisfaction of paying off debt. we have paid off 1/3 of our debt in the past 7 months. o yeah, and we've been praying a lot too!!! :)

Renata said...

To have a budget that works, you really need to know where your money is going. Only that way can you make the decision whether a purchase is worth it or not. Looks like you started in the right place. We have used quicken for years to track our spending.

I am responsible for keeping the food budget. Since we moved here, our amount has gone up quite a bit, but given I do most of my shopping at Marc's and Costco, I always have to use cash. This has helped keep me from overspending for the most part.

We still need to get better at it, especially when it comes to saving, but what we have learned over the 7 years we were in school has been a blessing. God has been good to us and we have been able to stay afloat this past year because of all He has taught us.