At the end of every quarter, I take a look at our actual spending as compared to what I budgeted at the end of last year. I don’t panic as long as there has been money to pay for everything and we aren’t raiding savings on a continual basis to pay for things, but, especially as the year winds down, I like to have an idea of what changes I need to make to the budgetread more…
Day Amount Place Category Thursday $10.00 Farmers Market Groceries Friday $8.00 car wash car $85.00 CostCo Groceries $15.00 Safeway Groceries Saturday $5.00 Target House $45.00 Office Depot House $5.00 Safeway Groceries $25.00 text books School Sunday $15.00 Home Depot House $32.00 Old Spaghetti Factory Eating Out Tuesday is the home inspection for the foster license/to complete the home study process for adoption. This weekend has been pretty much fully taken up with getting the house ready.read more…
I decided quite some time ago that weddings are all about the dress, and honestly, for various reasons, I wasn’t quite happy with my wedding dress. So I planned an excuse for a new dress. I see no need for C and I to renew our vows, but I thought it would be nice if, for our tenth wedding anniversary, we took a set of anniversary photos. (Our tenth anniversary is over a year away, soread more…
Day Amount Place Category Tuesday $3.28 Safeway Groceries Wednesday $4.23 Cafeteria Allowance Friday $163.36 CostCo Groceries $5.90 Post Office MIL $62.08 Safeway Groceries Saturday $7.98 IGA Groceries Sunday $5.00 Internet Allowance $61.00 Lowes House Felt much more in control this week. There were two days where we didn’t spend any money at all. Tuesday and Wednesday were small amounts (though one was lunch out for me). We also got everything mailed off toread more…
For my own sanity, my current organizational goals must focus on the upstairs. If I even start thinking about our basement, I’ll become to overwhelmed to do anything. We finished cleaning out the MIL’s apartment on Saturday. Besides three different trips to Goodwill, and two trips to Value Village that included two large bags of stuffed animals, 140 VHS tapes, and some furniture, we have added a significant number of items to our basement. Some things,read more…
I almost always do our taxes twice. I do a preliminary run through as soon as we have all (or most) of our paperwork. And later I’ll sit down with TurboTax and do a complete return. I like to know what’s coming up. This week, partly in preparation for yesterday’s Coffee Talk post, I did the first run through of our 2011 return. Last year, we owed around $1,100. This year, C only received half asread more…
Important information about the data: prior to mid 2010, money that went on the credit card never got classified in any category other than credit card. That skews the data for everything from eating out, allowance, pets, house, and misc. I have data going back to 2005, but for now, we’re sticking with what our financial life has looked like since 2008. Why 2008? That was the year I graduated with my MBA, the lastread more…
We are currently member of the National Consumer Panel- basically, we are a Neilsen family for what we buy. We’ve been doing this for about a month now, and it’s going alright. It’s a bit more work than I thought it would be. Scanning everything we buy isn’t that big a deal. Scanners are fun, after all. But if I shop somewhere other than a traditional grocery store, I have to enter the price I payread more…
2011 Budget 2011 Actual 2012 Budget Student Loans $ 685.00 $ 1,087.00 $ 685.00 School $ 850.00 $ 781.00 $ 850.00 Bills $ 2,135.00 $ 2,183.00 $ 2,190.00 Car $ 190.00 $ 638.00 $ 350.00 Groceries $ 450.00 $ 401.00 $ 350.00 Medical $ – $ 25.00 $ 25.00 Eating Out $ 150.00 $ 159.00 $ 150.00 Allowance $ 200.00 $ 250.00 $ 200.00 Pets $ – $ 181.00 $ 150.00 House $ – $ read more…
This post is about how I determined what to budget for each category last year and how I’m planning to change that, if at all. Here are our budget categories, the average we have spent each month (Jan-Oct) and the budgeted amount (at the beginning of the year- some values have changed) Student Loans: 1,087/685 School expenses: 781/850 Bills: 2,183/2,135 Car: 638/190 Credit Cards: 26/15 Groceries: 401/450 Medical: 25/0 Eating Out: 159/150 Allowance – me: 162/125read more…
