PITI = $637.74 Retirement/savings = $350 Car = $150 Utilities = $165 Cell phone = $130.84 Dog food and medication = $100 Grocery = $200 Gas = $200 Eating out = $120 Gifts, clothes, gym membership = $125 Home stores (Walmart, lowes, etc) = $250
Left over = $2.74
This is the budget I'm trying to set for myself and DH for May. I think we're going to have to decrease savings to $200 to put that extra money elsewhere. The "car" fund is an account we have. We bought our last car in cash, and will buy our next one as soon as we have enough in our car fund.
Your budget seems pretty good to me. My H and I have a budget that looks pretty similar to yours. How much do you have in savings now? Do you have any debt- SLs or CC?
Neither of us have jobs that contribute to retirement (we're students, lol) so that's really all we can afford right now. We just have all our 'savings' jumbled up in one account. We just starting to talk about how we should invest our money we're setting aside for retirement.
$150 to a car fund $350 to retirement (we have about $1500 in that account as of today, lol) Remainder of money at the end of the month into savings.
We just bought a used car (~30k miles on it) a few months ago for DH in cash, and mine is from 2009 (with about 30k miles on it) so we're good for a while on the car front.
Car fund I think is at $600.
The reason we have so much savings is because DH was deployed to Afghanistan during 2011-2012, so we got combat pay, didn't have to pay taxes, etc. DH is leaving the military later this month, so we're losing his income, except for what the VA pays for him to go to college.
We're trying to make up for our huge spending lately. $23k down payment in September and the $13k car purchase really hurt our bank account.
I don't see car insurance. Your groceries seem really low. Is $200 doable in your area? Home stores seems really vague. Is that home maintenance stuff? If so, I think that could be lowered.
I don't see car insurance. Your groceries seem really low. Is $200 doable in your area? Home stores seems really vague. Is that home maintenance stuff? If so, I think that could be lowered.
Thank you! Totally forgot about car insurance.
$200 for groceries is pretty low. It's doable, but it will probably have to go up a bit.
Home stores is like Lowes, Walmart, Home Goods, Tuesday Morning, Target, etc, and is pretty low (knowing me) as well.