We do not budget to the penny. We do much better with broad categories than 50 mvelopes. My categories are mortgage, SLs, bills (all household utilities, cell phones, cleaning lady, netflix, XM, any other recurring bill), discretionary spending (groceries, dining out, clothes, etc), major household expenses, and savings/investments. Our goal is $2500 in discretionary spending a month and I monitor with CC balances then pay in full. Doesn't matter if one month we spend $500 in groceries one month and $1000 in dining out then next month is $750 and $750, as long as our CC balance stays under $2500 for the month.
I have been using just the discover spend analyzer since that's our main CC but switching to quicken this year. I hated mvelopes. I also have a finance workbook to track overall savings, investments, debts, net worth, monthly utility payments, etc.
We do one auto transfer plus a month-end sweep into savings. If we cash flow something big I may pause our savings transfer.
We only budget 2 paychecks/month. All extra paycheck, bonuses, other found money either get earmarked for specific projects or swept into savings.
Post by crashgizmo on Feb 28, 2014 15:35:46 GMT -5
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? We budget to the penny but its okay if we go over certain categories. I don't budget the leftover money. Everything is joint but we each get fun money every month. 2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? Mint. I don't know where I'd be without it
3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? Our Roths are automatic transfers. When were building our efund it was automatic, but now that it's fully funded I usually keep it in the checking until I feel like either moving it to savings or investments 4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? Depends- birthday money is usually just like fun money. Tax refunds, when we get them, are put in savings or Roths. Bonuses are budgeted for and used accordingly.
@vicmo ewall Tell me more about YNAB, please? Is it like Mint?
Like Vicmo, I loooove YNAB. You can download a 30 day free trial. I've been using YNAB for 2+ years. Basic concepts:
1) Give every dollar a job. Budget for everything including savings.
2) Save for a rainy day. Budgeting monthly for semiannual and annual expenses so you don't get surprised when bills come in. Setting aside money for the inevitable car repairs, home maintenance, etc.
3) Roll with the punches. No month is perfect. Software allows you to roll overages forward to next month in that budget category or have it come directly out of next month's starting buffer. This feature also works well for work expenses that we are reimbursed for. Reevaluate your budget during month and make adjustments.
4) Live off last month's income. This is my FAVORITE part of YNAB! You build up a one month buffer in your checking account so there is no guessing how much money you have going into a month. You also never have to time bill payment or wonder if the money is there to pay for something.
Some people say YNAB is like an electronic envelope system. I have "on budget" accounts for checking, savings, cash back credit card. YNAB makes it easy for me to track CC transactions in relation to our budget. I pay off the card each month with budgeted funds. I use "off budget" accounts to track overall net worth.
It sounds complicated at first, and there is a bit of a learning curve. I took a couple of the free webinars and figured it out. DH and I have budget meetings twice per month. There is an app that works only if you have the desktop version. I don't have the app because I use an older version and haven't felt the need to upgrade.
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? I guess it's technically to the penny on mint, but it's not a big deal if we are over in one category or anything so long as money in > money out.we have a joint checking in addition to our own checking and savings accounts. we don't really use our personal checking accounts and we've been too lazy to change the savings accounts to joint. we've only been married 18 months after all. 2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? mint.com and a notebook 3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? we're trying the autotransfer. just switched this year. used to be a manual transfer at the end of the month. but now we don't have the 'cushion' we're used to so I don't know if we'll stick with auto or move to a transfer. 4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? depends. in general found money goes towards the car or student loans. my annual bonus paid for our long weekend in the bahamas, tax refund will probably go towards the car loan, birthday money (if we ever got such a thing. lolz. is this a thing for post-college adults?) would go to the birthday person. 5) What else is anyone else wondering about budgeting?
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? Before the baby, I was hard core about getting on a budget especially because we were living in VHCOL. Since the baby, so many of those things that were a drag on the budget are gone like VHCOL rent, international vacations and fancy dinners with copious alcohol. Right now the baby doesn't really cost us much. So currently I don't feel like money is so tight anymore and don't need to follow a budget.
2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? none. Well I do use Quickbooks for the office, but home budgeting doesn't really fit there.
3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? My husband transfers some money each month from his paycheck. Since I am paid after I pay all the bills at my practice, I save money in chunks as I stumble upon them.
4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? Usually save it in a personal savings account. But I stopped cashing checks from my parents. I felt bad taking their money even if it was supposed to be a gift. My dad noticed and has now started giving me gifts in cash.
5) What else is anyone else wondering about budgeting?
Post by peachdragon on Feb 28, 2014 16:31:55 GMT -5
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? I don't budget to the penny, but I track to the penny. We have joint accounts, but we each get "fun money" to play with every month. It has made for a much smoother marriage, finance-wise. 2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook?
3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month?
4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? Tax refunds aren't found money, it's part of your salary, so that goes toward normal expenses. Birthday money gets spent on fun things. 5) What else is anyone else wondering about budgeting?
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? Loose budget, all joint money except for a small amount of individual money that we each get from each pay period. 2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? Mint.com to track spending, excel spreadsheet for my actual budget. 3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? We have an automatic transfer to our investment account on the 15th of every month, and then I transfer to savings on the last day of the month depending on the monthly excess. 4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? Birthday money, we each typically blow on whatever we want at the time. We usually owe at tax time, but if by some miracle we ever get a refund, we'd probably try and do something fun with it like a nice dinner (I can't see us ever getting more than about $200 back, lol). 5) What else is anyone else wondering about budgeting? How do people actually stick to a to-the-penny budget?! I would be overdrafting my account every month if I didn't make a loose budget and allow some slush for almost all line items.
Since we've likely got a lot of different ways of doing things around here, I'm curious to see how many of us budget (or don't). Maybe some of us will get ideas for better ways to handle our own finances from the answers.
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? 2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? 3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? 4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? 5) What else is anyone else wondering about budgeting?
1. I budget very strictly. I have a couple goals that I'm working on (paying off SL and saving for a wedding and house)
2. Every month my paycheck is deposited into my Bills account. From there, money autotransfers to Savings, Christmas Fund and Discretionary Spending. Bills hold the amount that covers my bills, since they are the same each month. Discretionary Spending is what I use for groceries, gas, gifts, clothes, etc. So if I treat us to a nice dinner out one week, I cut back at the grocery store the next. I only get paid once a month and it makes it so I never have to worry about a bill popping up that last week and I've spent too much on gas or food.
3. Autotransfer the day after my paycheck clears. If I didn't save it first, I'd never save at all
4. Found money is fun money. I'm strict enough in my day to day that I don't have any reservation or guilt using this money for a new bed or a vacation (what I spent my tax refund on this year)
Post by sillygoosegirl on Feb 28, 2014 18:01:47 GMT -5
1) We budget loosely. We want to watch our trends, but we can afford to go over from time to time, so we don't worry about it when we do. Everything is joint. 2) We use Mint 3) We send money to savings via automatic transfers, and to our investment account via direct deposit 4) If it's a small amount, it goes to checking or into our wallets and is instantly forgotten about. If it's a larger amount, it generally goes into savings and is forgotten about. Though for gifts, we try to choose something that we can tell the person we spent it on... 5) I'm sure we would budget differently if money was tight.
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? Every item has a budget category that we try hard to stick to but I leave a rather large (approx. 10% of net) slush fund for misc. A lot of things tend to appear each month and they are never really in the same category (ie. house project one month, kids sports dues the next, new tires the month after) so I like this large slush fund. 2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? Spreadsheet and I use a piece of paper to write down all my bills as I pay them each paycheck to ensure what amount is left over. 3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? Just started automatic savings this month. It went well the first time so we will see how it goes. This is two savings accounts- one for general savings and one is a save to spend for car registration, Christmas, vacation, oil changes, and life insurance premiums. 4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? Try to save most and use a small portion to pay for something fun like dinner out or a decorating project. 5) What else is anyone else wondering about budgeting? ?
Post by IrishBelle on Feb 28, 2014 19:14:22 GMT -5
1) We budget loosely. Some is joint and some is separate. Our pay checks go into our separate accounts. We each transfer a set amount to the joint account. The amount is proportional to our incomes. Joint bills are paid from the joint account. We each have a bill or two from our personal accounts and whatever is left belongs to that person. We've had this system for the past 12 years or so and it works for us.
2) we use a spreadsheet.
3) Joint savings are taken care of monthly by automatic transfer. For individual savings, we usually transfer what's left at the end of the month.
4) Tax refunds are shared and go towards a joint goal or savings. Other found money goes to the person who received it.
Post by sarapocalypse on Feb 28, 2014 21:14:20 GMT -5
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? We try to track everything closely but our budget is sort of loose. Most of our categories have a range and it just depends on the month if we stick to the lower end of the range or creep up higher. Our stuff is all joint. We have joint accounts and a joint CC. We each have our own "fun money" accounts that were our accounts before we got married but we've failed pretty miserably at actually adding our fun money to those accounts.
2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? Spreadsheet.
3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? We have a savings as a category with a range of what we would like to save. Some months, when unexpected things come up or one-time expenses happen, money may get pulled from the savings category. Any extra at the end of the month will also get added to savings. I transfer this manually towards the end of the month (after our last monthly bill has come out).
4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? Smaller amounts (especially birthday/Christmas gifts) will usually be used for something fun/go towards something we've been saving for. Larger amounts ($200 or more) would probably go towards extra payments on my car or SLs or into savings.
5) What else is anyone else wondering about budgeting? How do you budget your saving categories (i.e., new car, vacation, house DP, E fund)? Do you do separate accounts? Mentally earmark certain amounts for certain things? Where do you keep your savings?
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? Loosely. We used to really watch our spending, but once we had a handle on how much we spend in an average month and it didn't vary that much, we were able to relax a bit. We both know it's ok if we spend a couple hundred on fun stuff, a couple hundred on eating out, etc. I still kind of watch our spending, so we don't accidentally creep way outside of what we should be spending, but we no longer have an actual budget document with categories, amount spent, amount left to spend though.
All of our money is joint. We've done everything separate, yours/mine/ours, and joint, and we both like joint the best. It's easiest, and our money seems to go farther. 2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? A spreadsheet for upcoming bills, and Mint for monitoring past spending. I mostly just use Mint to compare months and see if anything looks unusual. I wish Mint would generate a report of all of the categories for the past X number of months. Or maybe it does, I don't know. I need to find out more what this website can do. 3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? Both. Automatic transfer out of every paycheck, and occasional transfers of any excess that accumulates.
4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? Birthday and Christmas money is each person's to use however they want. Anniversary gifts, tax refunds, etc. are put toward an agreed upon use. Bonuses can be one or the other, depending on how much they are.
Post by bostonmichelle on Feb 28, 2014 22:20:31 GMT -5
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? We budget to the penny. But if we go over in one category we pull from another category. Our money is all joint, but we get fun money and both are allowed leeway within a lot of categories.
2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? I use quicken to track our spending then transfer the totals to a spreadsheet every week to see how we are doing for the month.
3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? We have automatic transfers for save to spend accounts. We also have auto savings for our budgeted savings amount. If we have extra leftover I manually move it.
4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? We usually put it in savings or vacation fund. My over time and commissions go 1/2 towards debt repayment and 1/2 towards savings.
Since we've likely got a lot of different ways of doing things around here, I'm curious to see how many of us budget (or don't). Maybe some of us will get ideas for better ways to handle our own finances from the answers.
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? 2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? 3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? 4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? 5) What else is anyone else wondering about budgeting?
We don't budget to the penny. I go by the nearest $5/$10. We have one joint checking account, but it's just a spot for DH to direct deposit part of his paycheck to help me fund savings and the rest to help with the bills. But all $ is joint, the logistics are just set up abnormally. He has a checking account, I have a checking account. We fund our own fun money from there.
Mint.com. But sometimes I'd update an excel file, especially during the beginning of the year after the holidays' spending aftermath.
Savings are automatically taken out of our checking account(s). The excess becomes spending money.
Tax refund goes to efund account. Ebates, money/gift card gifts goes toward travel since we have a small travel budget this year.
What I'm wondering about budgeting? I have one:
What can you do with a $2,400 travel budget, especially if you have 3 weeks of vacation? Anyone? :?
Since we've likely got a lot of different ways of doing things around here, I'm curious to see how many of us budget (or don't). Maybe some of us will get ideas for better ways to handle our own finances from the answers.
1) Do you budget to the penny? Do you loosely budget? Is your money a free for all? Yours/mine/ours? His and hers? Joint everything? Loosely budget with a checking account cushion. By loose I mean, we have 20-some categories, some of which are pretty specific, but we roll negative and positive amounts month to month in any applicable category. All accounts are joint, I handle all of them.
2) Do you use a spreadsheet? Mint.com? Quicken? A notebook? mint.com
3) How do you handle savings? Automatic transfer? Transfer excess at the end of the month? auto transfer
4) What do you do with "found" money (birthday gift money, tax refund, etc)? My quarterly bonuses and all other 'found' money go into a savings account that we decide on a rolling basis to spend on travel, home improvements, splurge items, etc.
1) Free for all, but we live well below our means. We keep everything separate. For simplicity sake, I am the one that makes sure all the monthly bills - rent, utes, etc - get paid. So if I am low on funds, H will transfer enough money for me to pay several months at once. When I was single, I budgeted to the penny.
2) N/A. When single, I used a notebook.
3) We don't save every month. Since we have a business, we pay ourselves, pay our federal taxes and put money into our Solo 401k when we get a check from a customer. When I was single and had a "wage donkey" job (that's working for the man - Old Simpson's quote), I did 401k deposits and then transferred what ever was left at the end of the month to my non tax deferred accounts.
4) Gift money - hookers and blow. Tax refunds - this might as well be a unicorn to me. We usually end up owing 10-20k.
1) free for all 2) mint. Although its not really a true budget in that if we go over, we say oops and do nothing. The budget is just a loose guideline of what I think we should spend. Mostly to keep us accountable. 3) At the end of the month, I look to see what mint give us for "net income." Everything that mint says wasn't spend get transferred to savings. 4) deposit it and maybe spend it. Generally, it just goes into the general fun, but we might mentally budget it to something. Like we got a $500 check for Christmas and decided we would use that to splurge on a charter fishing trip. So we deposited it, and then went fishing. It wasn't like we cashed it and saved the cash for the trip or put it in its own accounts, 5) I'm good.