Confession: Throughout our marriage of two and a half years we have half-heartedly followed a budget. Starting today for this month of November 2009 we are going to follow our budget and keep better track of where all our money goes. Do you have any tips? Please leave us a comment, silly or serious, to help us out. Halloween pictures will soon follow. Thanks!
4 months ago
7 comments:
Ben set up a sweet excel worksheet...it's pretty complicated and we have adjusted it as we get smarter, but it sure helps us!
I'm anxiously awaiting to see what comments you get because we're in the same boat. :) We need to be better at sticking to one too!
No wonder you have trouble following your budget - looks like a good deal of your money gets flushed down the toilet. I'm anxious to see your halloween pictures, especially of little Yoda.
Quicken, Quicken, Quicken! It's amazing!
This is a free online version of quicken:
http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-finance-software/free-online-money-management.jsp
Paste that in your browser and set yourselves up a new account. It is the best. So easy to keep track of every dollar because you can put it in the right category if it doesn't automatically go there. Then you can look at the pie chart to show you where all your money really goes. AND you can make a personal budget tracker that will even send you text messages when you are getting close to your budgeted amount. You connect it to all of your bank accounts to it updates as you spend...it's so handy. I LOVE Quicken, but I don't really like to spend money to manage money (at least while there is so little to manage). So, I REALLY LOVE this free version of quicken. Andrew also says mint.com is great. It looks like the same thing to me so I haven't tried it yet.
Jenn,
In 6 Years of Marrage, Matt and I Have NEVER had even 1 fight about money. We live by 1 simple pricipal, "Work as hard as You can, and give your first 10% to the Lord." Be smart with your money, but don't make yourself miserable!
Your little Boy is ADORABLE!!!
Hey Jen! It's been FOREVER! We are the same way! We pretended we had a budget but never really followed it and never really knew where our money went. We were living with the in-laws and I said I would do almost anything to move out... so we had to REALLY do a budget in order for it to happen. Now we do the Dave Ramsey thing... cash in the envelopes. We have an envelope for everything- groceries, gas, formula, going out (not very much!!!), insurance... then we try to NEVER use our debit card unless we really HAVE to. We do leave money in for bills we have to pay online or by check but since we never use the debit card we know the money is there when we need it. We always had our budget written down but never followed it and we've had WAY more success the last 3 months doing this. It's amazing how much more $5 means to me now than it did before! We were really bad at recording where the money went so now we just know when it's gone, it's gone! Wow, this is long but we really sucked at the budget thing until we did this so I thought I'd suggest it. By the way, how are you? :) Hope everything is going great for you!
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