Budgeting is eye opening and somewhat depressing

[Deleted]

Sounds like you have some big categories to dig into, which means finding saving / investing oppys without too much belt tightening which is awesome. Food was a biggie for us, and "fun money". It is insane how much we can save now!! Go you!

[aMrsin09]

We use quicken and break out groceries, dining out (sit down dinners for us) and eating out (running through McDonald at lunch etc).
THAT was eye opening.

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[raangoli]

That's fantastic! Putting things down on "paper" (or Excel) is really sobering, but it helps to really see where your money is going. It seems like you're doing well focusing on paying down your debt; that's really exciting!

[tommygirl03]

I am afraid to break see what we spend on food (groceries & eating out/take out) and Target. Those are my scary categories.


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[noodleoo]

I was shocked as well when I started using Mint at how much we were spending on food. Just knowing helps you make better choices! Good luck!

[Deleted]

It is eye opening, but the good news is that you know where to cut now.

We don't have a set budget but I do track things in Mint so I can at least keep an eye on spending. When it comes to month to month expenditures, we used to get into the habit of thinking "oh, it's only $48 for all the movie channels" or "an $8 lunch won't break us." But man, all that shit adds up fast. I think we found a good $500 last time we started cutting, and it wasn't even anything too life changing. It's not like we can watch 50 movie channels all at once. lol

[bittybomb]

It is totally sickening when you first have that "holy shit!" realization.  Like, my stomach feel to the floor.

But then, as we did tighten up, the feeling became actually amazing.

[aMrsin09]

Oh yes. It didn't go over well when I asked H why he felt the need to hit McDonald's THREE times in one day.

And when quicken asked if I wanted to add the Home Depot type store as a scheduled transaction I threatened to take his card away.

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[sillygoosegirl]

When we first started tracking, we found we were spending on average $800/month more than we thought we were spending (and our budget was only for $2200/month). It was eye-opening to say the least. There's nothing quite like it...

[aurora]

We were shocked at how much we spent on food, too. I think that's a pretty common one. Good luck with the budgeting!

[Deleted]

That's great you can get it all paid off that quickly!


Tracking our random spending really has helped us. We knew we had a set grocery budget, which is fine, but then H would stop at Safeway twice a week for random food for his office, which would be okay, but that was an extra 50 dollars a week that wasn't accounted for in the budget.

Budgeting for me has really helped me to realize that everything I spend comes from somewhere - meaning if I spend 100 dollars here, that's 100 dollars left to put towards christmas, or whatever. It sounds so obvious but seeing it all written out makes a huge difference.

[crashgizmo]

It's great that you are looking at it and it looks like getting out of debt is doable for you guys! When DH and I met 5 years ago, we had about $50K in debt between cars and credit cards. We paid everything off in about 2 years and have been debt free since. It's a great feeling, believe me!

[thebulldog]

I love the categories in Quicken! has anyone figured out the new budget system in the newest version? they changed it from the previous versions and I don't like this one as much.

[Deleted]

Ugh. I need to get back to this.

[bostonmichelle]

I love quicken for the ability to break down things. We always tracked everything. But one day about 2 years ago I decided to actually budget and I was shocked. We've made huge amounts of progress in 2 years in the way of debt reduction and building net worth.