Finance Fridays: I have a Budget!
This is insane! I never thought I’d get to the point where I’d be one of those people with budgets. For the last five years we’ve been at a place where we didn’t make enough money to pay the bills, and every time we put it down in a budget I’d just cry.
Since I moved on from the please let me work extra for you without billing because I can’t charge for the time I think about your project while I’m in the shower can I? business owner client thing and went to the oh my gosh there’s actually more work available than I could actually do in a month? Don’t you dare pinch me because if I’m dreaming I want to be in a coma freelance writing thing our lives have changed dramatically. Oh, and Randy getting his awesome-tastic job in January certainly didn’t hurt, either.
September we are going to make more money than either one of us has ever imagined. Maybe for you it wouldn’t be that much money, but for us, this is huge. We wanted to make sure we didn’t mess this up and blow the money without realizing it. It was time to make a real, live budget.
I have two bulletin boards on my wall. We got them when a business was getting rid of them and we snagged them. In order to not have that “cubicle blue” color they originally were, we put gold wrapping paper on them. It looks awesome against the green color of my office, so that’s what the gold color is in the picture.
I purposefully took this picture with my cell phone because I wanted it to be just a tad blurry. My boundaries haven’t been set yet on if I’m comfortable sharing exactly how much we are in debt, how much we bring in a month, and how much our budgetary expenses are a month.
No offense, it’s not because of YOU, it’s because of those other people.
But I wanted to share what my personal junk looks like. If I turn my head to the right these papers are at eye level if I stand up. Let me tell you a little about what’s going on.
September Budget
The September budget is us spending every penny “on paper, on purpose.” It includes entertainment, gas, extra money in case Randy needs to eat out for lunch because he forgot to take one. Everything. Every. Little. Thing. Those little things that I usually don’t add up into the budget are about $900 a month. I almost choked when I saw the numbers. No wonder we were always scrambling!
The bottom total in red is expenses for the month. Next to that I have income for the month (brought over from another spreadsheet with income. If you saw that one you’d be amazed at how many entries there are. I do a lot of different stuff! Then the boxes on the right are, in order:
- Expenses
- Income
- Total left over
- How leftover total is being spent
- That yellow box is the paypal information. How much is going into paypal, how much comes out of paypal, and the balance. The balance turned out to be the gas budget almost exactly so all gas purchases are going to come off of the PayPal Debit Card.
- That last green box is how much the budget is balanced to. In this case, for September, the budget it balanced with THIRTY-THREE cents left over.
Both Randy and I agree it feels good to balance the budget this closely. Since we have the Baby Step #1 emergency fund in place we can do that and if an emergency comes up we are still okay. It feels so weird to live without constant fear.
Debt Snowball
Ok, on this one I’m cheating just a little bit. it does not include three mystery debts from a hospital. Mostly because I think those mystery debts were from the birth of my first daughter and covered by Medicaid. (Since we’re in Illinois, if you’re low income you can get a medical card. Illinois rules for health care.) Thankfully we saved the cards, so we should be able to fax over the information and get those off of our credit reports. Okay, off of my credit report. Guess it’s my baby, my credit report. Nice.
Baby Steps & More on The Budget
I like having a constant one-page reminder of the baby steps. Eventually when I’m feeling really smart I’d like to put dates by each baby step. I found this list of the baby steps as well as the brief summary of each on Ezine Articles. I copied and pasted the article into Word, made the headlines big and bold, took off the information I didn’t need and printed it out.
I mean, I love me some Dave Ramsey, but I’m not going to spend almost $30 on the book and workbook when I can get the information for free. It would be silly when I could spend that $30 on my budget or debt.
The only thing is, of our total debt number including the mortgage check out these numbers:
- Our student loans are 31% of the total! That is huge!
- Our mortgage is 62%
Just those two numbers are 94% of our debt!
I couldn’t tell you how many items are on our budget. Oh wait, thank you Excel, yes I can. There are *gasp* 23! Here are the categories:
- Randy Emergency Lunch Fund
- Groceries
- Gas
- Entertainment
- Eating Out
- Savings
- Mortgage
- Web Hosting
- Ring Central
- e-junkie
- AT&T Wireless
- Domain Names
- Nicor
- Garbage
- Savings
- ComEd
- Student Loan Randy
- Student Loan Jen
- Chase
- Water
- iPass
- Esurance
- PrePaid Legal
Wow. That’s a lot. We’re canceling some of these to reduce cost. PrePaid Legal and Ring Central to be exact. That will give us an extra $28 to add to the budget. If I add that $28 to my mortgage payment it would be paid off seven months early. Every dollar makes a difference.
In case you’re wondering why I share things like the items on my budget is because it reminds me of things that I may have forgotten. Most of you know I finally took the plunge and signed back up for dedicated Internet and cable television. That’s not on the list. We haven’t been billed for it yet. That’s going to have to wait until October, because I’m paying off that damn car in September.
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2 Responses to “Finance Fridays: I have a Budget!”
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Yep – I’m a Joiner!
I used to use Esurance, but I found that they were really really expensive. We’re with Progressive now, better rates, and as we found out with the accident last year, great coverage!
Shop around, if you haven’t in the last year — you may be surprised by how much you can save. I know I was.
My husband has a thing for rear ending people once every three years…so yeah…esurance is actually the cheapest. I check regularly.