When you finally decided to be on a budget how long did it take to actually stick to it and how long did it last before you started your old habits again? Was it hard at first? How many times did you tried again to make it work?

For me its been 5 months since i started it and I still have trouble crunching the numbers. I generally stick to it, though I could work on this a bit. My problem with it is allocating all money somewhere.

I guess the real trick to sticking to it is making it habit. Yes I tweak my budget all the time but I have been on one since I was married 4 years ago or if not on it strictly I was still tracking everything so I have a record of what things cost and what areas are challenges for me.
So I plan to be on a budget forever there is no reason to over buy. Maybe when things are less tight the budget will include eating out more or extra fun money but we will still manage where our money is going.

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Kimberly Proud Mommy to Bethany Rose April 2006 &

Organizer of the Coupon Clippers of Tacoma

We've been on a budget since we were married, and so it's just second nature. The thing that helps us the most is groceries, gas and pocket money are cash, and it has to last until next paycheck. We do sometimes splurge a little, and put stuff on the card, but NEVER unless it can be paid for in full when the bill comes.

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"And the state of his bathroom -- I'm not one to gossip, but there are things crusted on his sink that have not simply developed intelligent life but have in all probability by now evolved their own political systems." Cain describes Abel in in SANDMAN #70

We've been on a budget for about 18 months now. It was kinda tough for a while because I was so use to spending all our money on stupid stuff, but I finally got use to it. I am just now getting to the point where I am sticking to it 100%. I got my sister and a couple of my friends to create a budget and re-evaluate their financial situations too, so we have a support group. The hardest part for us is to say no to our friends when they ask us to go to a concert with them or out to dinner (Especially those friends who don't worry about money).

We have been on a budget for about 9 years. We started with the envelope system, spending only cash in the envelope for certain items. It has worked well. We were actually talking the other day because we have not increased the budget in all of this time. But with the baby and the increasing price of food, we think we will have to increase the grocery budget a little for next year. It works wonders,welove it and wouldn't have it any other way.

Once we started budgeting, we never looked back! Now several years into budgeting, I rearrange things every few months to make sure our spending lines up with our priorities and goals. Surprisingly, we live a lot better now with a budget than we did when we had double the income and spent the money without a plan.

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You must be the change you want to see in the world ~ Gandhi

We have been on a budget since May, and WOW, what a difference it makes! We started budgeting to see if we could afford for me to become a full-time SAHM. I had always thought it was impossible, and that even if I did, we would be so broke that we wouldn't have a dime left over at the end of the month. Well, to make a long story short, we started tracking our expenses and found out that we were blowing so much money on unneccesary expenses, (dining out, etc.) So we decided to stick to a loose budget, (meaning our goal was to keep it around a certain amount in our dining out, entertainment and groceries budgets, but not neccesarily an exact number). We found out that I could've probably quit working a long time ago.
Now that I've been home for a while, we are discovering that money is not really much of an issue afterall, like we thought it would be.
We are able to still live in our nice home, drive our nice cars, spend money without feeling guilty AND add quite a bit of money into savings! We never thought that was even possible!
We used to live paycheck to paycheck, with very little in savings, all with me working! I even made really good money, even with all of the working expenses (daycare, gas, etc.)
So, I guess to sum it up, we are the most financially comfortable we have been in 8 years of marriage, living on only one income, all because we finally took an honest look at where we were spending our money, and setting reasonable limits for our catagories. It only took one or two months to really appreciate just how much a budget helped our family.
You can do it!!!! If we can do it, anyone can!