I’m excited about setting up a new budget and working toward financial goals. I know I’ve mentioned this here so often, but I really like having a goal, or goals, and working towards that goal(s). It’s like a challenge to see if you can accomplish a goal that you’ve set out for yourself. One area that I know has always been challenging and that has needed some looking at and some goal setting is our financial health. We were on one income for about a year but now we have two incomes again, albeit half of what it used to be, but it’s a dual income nonetheless. So it will be nice to set aside some money for a rainy day. Or a new car.
Before we get started with the budget, the Mister’s car has been at the shop since November. The final diagnosis? It’s dead. Or rather, we could spend a ton of money to fix it but we decided it’s not worth it. It’s 19 years old. The Mister bought it brand new about 4 months before he and I met. It’s got about 200,000 miles on it. It was time to let it go. But now we have one car–the Grocery Getter. It’s 14 years old and just rolled over to 250,000 miles. But it got a clean bill of health from the garage after having some minor work done. It shook, rattled, and rolled so much that I thought for sure there was something really wrong with it. Turns out is was in desperate need of the tires being rotated and balanced. It also needed an O2 sensor, an inspection, and an oil change. BUT we still need to put some money aside for a car fund. For now I feel confident enough that the car will get me thru the rest of this commuting season and thru the summer. We’ll readdress it as needed. So maybe we’re not setting money aside for a rainy day as I’d hoped, but goals and needs are what they are.
So on to our new budget. I started the new budget on February 15th since this was my first full paycheck for the new semester. Our initial budget, after paying bills, was to keep $300 in checking as a cushion, withdraw $250 for cash spending for 2 weeks, and transfer the rest to savings. I don’t think we did as good as I had hoped. One category that will need addressing is our gas category. I was making it up to start with because I haven’t really kept track of how much I spend weekly commuting to work. Now, on to the budget categories and how we made out.
As I stated, we withdrew $260 (supposed to be $250 but I was using an ATM. I had to pay a fee for the ATM because my bank is 30 minutes away. I’d rather pay the $3.75 in fees rather than spend $10 in gas. I have since found an ATM that let’s you get $10 out and their fee is $2.50. We’ll be using this one from now on). The categories are:
1. Groceries and Supplies: $100
2. Gas: $80
3. Eating Out: $40
4. Other: $40
How did we do?
1. Groceries and Supplies: spent $160.59
2. Gas: $132.62
3. Eating Out: $88.63
4. Dog Food: $38.97 (3 month supply)
Total spent: $420.81.
Oops! We went over budget by $271 (the ‘other’ category above was the Mister’s spending money for 2 weeks so our budget was really $220).
My thoughts? Perhaps our cash spending budget isn’t realistic. But mostly where we overspent was unnecessary–like eating out. We can certainly cut back in this area. I was also low on supplies since I was in between semesters at work and didn’t have an income. So I stocked up on some things. I won’t need to do this all the time. For example, Groceries were really $71.90 + $10 for my raw milk, both are well within our budget, but the rest were on supplies that we needed. We’ll add these items into our biweekly grocery spending money. We might need to tweak this category if we are still spending beyond that, but I think it’s okay for now.
We also overspent in gas. I knew this was going to happen. But we also traveled more in the past 2 weeks than what we normally do. I’ll bump this category up a little this time. Eating out will remain the same. This gives us enough to pick up a pizza or other carry out item, but doesn’t allow for a ‘going out to eat at a restaurant’ which is where we start spending more money! Lesson learned.
I’m hoping to do better for March. I’ve already spent some money for March so let’s go ahead and set our categories up here. Then I can update at the end.
This is every two weeks:
1. Groceries and Supplies: $120
2. Gas: $150
3. Eating Out: $40
4. Incidentals: $40
Total: $350
So we’re bumping it up by $100. Stay tuned to see how we do! I’m really excited about this! Challenge accepted!!