Have you ever wondered... where did it all go? Money that is. This is where my handy dandy budget comes in! Three years ago I created a budget using Excel to keep track of our spending...and I mean
ALL of it! Why Excel vs some other savvy personal financial planning software?? I already had it, I already knew how to use it... and it did the job just fine.
In the beginning, it was more of a tracking device than an actual budget. The toughest part was remembering to save all receipts, and getting Jaime to do the same. After about a year of 'tracking' our spending habits, I felt pretty good that our expenses were being logged accurately, for the most part.
I was shocked to learn that most of our disposable income was going to fast food/dining out! Were we really eating out
THAT much??? Apparently so. 2-4 times a week added up to several hundred dollars each and every month! This is where the
REAL budget came in, and it took a full year to implement. We often went beyond our budget, and dipped onto our savings. By the end of the second year, we noticed a major improvement. We were eating out about once a week vs 2-4 times. This second year was tough, and some months were a lot better than others. We made a lot of life changes in this second year, making it difficult at times to track/stick to our budget. We moved from Hawaii to Seattle, purchased our first home, and enrolled Noah in preschool.
In the third year, things started to settle a bit, but we still incurred some unexpected expenses. We had to replace our roof, replace main water line from meter to house, and we added another beautiful addition to our family... Bella!
We are now entering our 4th year of budgeting, and I think it gets better every year! This year we hope to pay off all of our bad debt, (car & credit card), and I'm working to reduce our food bill. I'm researching local farms and looking to purchase half a pig, and some local beef. Jaime is a big meat eater!! While I do this, I'm also trying to stretch our meat by eating more grains and vegetables. For example, instead of serving several pork chops and mashed potatoes (Jaime's fav) for dinner, we take
one large pork chop, chop into small pieces and cook with green beans and Kabocha. If and when we get our garden started, hopefully that will provide us with some veggies. I hope to start baking bread again. Buying in bulk and cooking from scratch seems to make all the difference, and tastes great too.
We buy used whenever we can, and don't buy things that we really don't need. Sometimes it is hard to differentiate between a
need and a
want. We are working harder than ever to really stick to it, and rethinking many of our purchasing decisions. I'm excited to see where our budget takes us this next year.
