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 budget for the next year.

Last November, I did a 3 parts series (you can read them here, here, and here) about my year end budget review and how I was coming up with my new budget amounts. Because of some major expenses this year (that I want to have a couple more months to dissipate into the averages) I probably won’t set my 2013 budget until December. But it never hurts to take a look and see where you are.

As you can see, on average, we have gone over our budget by $835/month. Yikes. That’s a lot a lot. However, I’m not freaking out. Why? Well, if you look at savings, we’ve actually put over $1,600/month more into savings than I’d planned. That’s almost twice our over budget amount, so I know we’re not frivolously spending the money.

We also had a budget line for my MIL, from whom we expected to get $40/month toward her cell phone bill. Her passing earlier this year means we stopped getting that money, but that we did get some life insurance, though we also paid some bills out of our account from that money. That’s a positive difference of over $2,700/month right there.

Of course, now I might need to be concerned that without that money next year, could we be in danger?

I don’t think so. We had some one time only expenses this year, like buying a car for almost $10k, loaning $3k to my brother, and the initial adoption expenses around $3k (which averages out to over $1,750/month). When I figure the budget numbers for next year, I’ll remove those expenses from our averages.

Also helping us out this year, I got a slightly larger raise than anticipated. And when we decided to up our cable service (because we had to add a home phone), J voluntarily increased the amount of rent he is paying in order to help cover the increase in the bill.

Things I am a little worried about- our grocery bill. We’re at over $100/more than I budgeted for, and we haven’t even had Thanksgiving or Christmas yet- two times of year when we traditionally spend quite a bit of money on groceries.

I’m also a little concerned by how much we’re over on allowance. $54 over 9 months is almost $500. I know some of that was (delayed) emotional spending in response to the death of my MIL. But some has also come from the fact that we do have a very healthy savings at the moment (needed if we go the private adoption route) and sometimes, when you know you’ve got money sitting in the bank, it makes it hard not to buy things you want, especially when you can make an argument for why you almost need them.