I always thought I was good at budgeting things. And I now know I really stink at it that is why we are where we are at. How do you create a budget? This sounds so silly and simple but yet I am having the hardest time creating one that is going to work. Do you write all your bills on a calender? Just how are you doing it? I would like some examples and a direction on where to go.

This is what we did:

We gathered all our bills and receipts for a month.

Then we entered everything into an excel sheet and categorized everything.
-monthly household bills
-car bills
-gas
-grocery receipts
-pet expenses
-baby/kid items
-eating out
-entertainment
-gifts
-travel
-subscriptions/memberships
-miscellaneous

Then we went over what was a necessity and what we could lower or eliminate.

Fast forward two years...we are still working on sticking to the budget each month . But we did eliminate a lot of things like memberships/subscriptions and stuff that we don't need. And now we have a concrete number that we need to stick to each month for groceries. And we have stopped eating out as much and when we do we no longer go to the expensive places that we used to. We also keep our gift budget to about $25 per couple or person, whereas before we never really thought about it. We also created a gift list and do our best to stick with it. We also budget in money for travel (i.e we try each year to go to S. Dakota to visit DH's grandma and relatives and then budget in either one week long trip or a couple of weekenders each year). Before we would just go on random trips.

Sandra

I had to write every bill down and what we pay every month for my dh to understand why we needed some sort of a budget and why when he would want to go out, I would say we cant afford it. We do not stick to it as much as we should, BUT our big problem is that we do not make the same amount of money each month. Loooong story there.



By the way, SandraK, I am in SD. Where do you go visit??

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