Couple Money » Budgeting

Step Away from the Card -Watching Expenses in February

Elle — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:05:16 +0000

January has been a fun month – plenty of visits from family and friends (coming to us, which is much easier than traveling than visit all of them). We’re so happy that they came and caught up with us. I hope we can do this more through out the year.

As I was winding down for the evening last night, I checked our bank accounts and noticed our buffer shrank a bit – that’s our cue to keep an eye out on what we spend. Looking ahead, it seems like we’ll be more budget conscious over the next month.

Upcoming Expenses in February

February may possibly be an eventful month – besides a family trip we may also (finally!) get to refinance the house (see below). With so much to do, we’ll be keeping a close eye on our budget. We’ll have to avoid using the joint account for unnecessary expenses if we want to keep a buffer in place.

Visiting Our Friends in the Mountains

Next month we’re traveling to spend some time with our friends. That means we need to make sure the car is ready. It’s about time for an oil change, so I’ll schedule that as soon as possible. It also means spending a day cleaning the car out just to get out stuff packed in there!

It also means saving a bit for gasoline and food for the trip. It’s nothing major expense wise, but just something to keep track of for the budget.

Refinance the House?

I mentioned last week that we were a bit stuck with one of the lenders on getting an estimate for a refinance (ironically with our current lender). We did hear from them (not the original person we were working with, someone else) and it looks like they weren’t even going to try and compete. I kind of disappointed as I wanted to stay with them – I would’ve prefer having one less account to track. However when the gentlemen kept telling me that 5% was such as a great rate and refinancing to 3.25% wasn’t really going to save us on monthly payments (of course – we’re looking at long term!), I figure he wasn’t willing to even look at getting us a decent deal.

Fortunately another offer came in and it was for 3.125%. It looks as if we’re going ahead with the refinance deal (after we finish reviewing the paperwork tonight and asking a few questions). While that means saving money for the family in the long term, it’ll be a tight fit over the next month.For one thing we have to decide if we want to put more money down for the closing or if we want to roll some of that into the new mortgage.

Status of the Car Replacement Fund

Depending on what we do with the refinancing, the car replacement fund will be affected somehow. If we decide to go ahead and take care of everything at closing that could mean pulling some money from our savings and pausing on the funding the car replacement fund.

While the car we’re using is uncomfortably small for us now, it’s not an emergency. If we have to wait a bit more before buying a roomier family car, then that’s fine with me.

Thoughts on No Spending

I think we should talk a bit more tonight and see where we need to adjust and put a Mint alert on spending. What’s the longest you’ve gone without spending on discretionary items? What are your plans for next month?

Photo Credit: dustydean

Thank you again for subscribing to Couple Money! Here some recent popular topics from the site:

Our 2012 Family Budget

Elle — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:51:21 +0000

2012 Monthly Family Budget

This week has been all about getting the family budget together. Earlier this week the two of us pulled out the spreadsheets I fixed up and went over our plans for the family budget next year. Here is what we came up for our family’s monthly budget for 2012:

Mortgage: $850
Extra Mortgage Payment: $175
Groceries: $350
Home Association Fees $100
Electricity $100
Gas: $15
Cellphone $150
Internet/Basic Cable $75
Car Insurance 87.58
Dining Out: $100
Student Loan: $150
Entertainment: $35
Shopping (Personal Care/Household/Baby Stuff) $165
Irregular Bills: $60

Few Notes on Our Family Budget

I’m rounding the numbers a bit, but you’re pretty much looking at our family’s expenses. It’s based on our actual spending in 2011. We don’t anticipate big changes with them next year, but we’ve now included a bit of buffer for our irregular bills that happen through out the year, like property taxes and we’ve also estimated on the high side for electricity (usually lower in the winter).

As far as eating out goes we’ve discovered 2 things while we were hanging with our baby girl at home.

We didn’t miss eating out as much as we thought. We still go out, but we do lunches which saves us a bit money and tend to have smaller crowds than dinner.
We can cook some dinner better than restaurants. With time on our hands we’ve kicked up our cooking skills a notch (nowhere near chef level, but an improvement). My husband can make a fantastic ribeye steak dinner than’s been better than most places we’ve had at restaurants. Having friends over for dinner also keeps us in the loop with our buddies.

We also need to get the digital antenna up and cancel the basic cable we have left. I admit we’ve been procrastinating on that and there really isn’t a good reason. We watch Netflix and some network television, but that’s about it. It’ll knock down the bill from $75/month to $55/month.

I’ve left our charitable contributions out of the budget because I believe that’s a personal and private decision. As I mention before, I wanted to increase our giving in 2012.

Thoughts on Our Family Budget

Chatting with my husband about the family budget was actually a bit of fun (there I said it!). He’s a great at analyzing long term goals and he’s great with coming up with ‘what ifs’. All in all I’m really happy with where we’re at with our finances. I’m just hoping that we’ll be able to stick with the plan.

Photo Credit: sunshinecity

Thank you again for subscribing to Couple Money! Here some recent popular topics from the site:

Our Family Budgeting Tools

Elle — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:15:17 +0000

As we continue this week’s theme of budgeting, I want to share some of the tools we use for creating and maintaining our family budget. Last month, during the 50/50 Challenge I was asked a questions about budget software from Darris:

…I’d love an update on budget software. I use Mint and love it because it’s free. I used Quicken and QuickBooks for years and then bought an iMac and wasn’t happy with how either worked. I’d love to hear other Mac users thoughts. I also use the ‘envelope system’ that I’ve devised myself and LOVE it. Now if I can just get my husband on board . . .

I won’t highlight all options available (too many to count), but besides what we use I’ll mention a couple of other options based on what I’ve heard from others and discovered myself. I hope it will be useful as you create your 2012 family budget.

How We Create a Family Budget

Creating a realistic budget is a relatively straight forward project for us. We’ve been married for about 5 years so we’ve developed a little bit of a system.

Track your actual expenses.For a budget to work, we need it to be based on our actual family’s needs, so we use tools like Mint or Quicken to see where our money went.
Review your actual expenses. We sat down last night and talked about what the numbers were for different categories.
Create a doable budget. We then pull out the spreadsheet and create a basic budget.
Update your bill pay. For those regular and recurring expenses we go ahead and get the automated bill pay done. Savings and extra payments are also automated if applicable.
Review and adjust.Getting a budget done just right on the first time isn’t always the case. Most of the time we have to tweak it just a bit to get working.

We’re getting better with budgeting, but it still takes time. Doing the budget together is something that helps us to get on the same financial page for the upcoming year.

Google Docs and Templates Plus Quicken

We’ve been using a Google Docs spreadsheet that we share for our family budget. It’s served us well, but we hadn’t updated it in about two years.

When we review our actual spending in 2011, I noticed that for the most part we’ve stayed about the same with our monthly expenses. The big exceptions are baby stuff (about $40/month) and the extra mortgage payments (right now it’s at $175/month). We spend more for personal care now, but our gas bill for the house dropped dramatically for example.

I tried to see if I could export Mint’s data to a spreadsheet, but I could find a way, so I fired up Quicken to get a report of where our money went. I currently use 2011 Quicken Premier and it’s a very handy tool.

If you’re looking for a practical budgeting spreadsheets, I’d like to recommend J. Money’s template.

How We Keep Our Budget

After we agree upon and update our budget, our focus now turns to maintaining it. Staying on top of our spending and spending isn’t too hard as we have a system in place that can give us a snapshot in about 5 minutes and with just a little bit of help with spreadsheets we can calculate our monthly net worth fairly quickly.

Mint – Easy and Free

I think being free and easy are the biggest reasons we use Mint. It’s easy for us as the data from our joint account are automatically pulled and Mint organizes it for us. With a few clicks we can check month to month and we can compare them against each other. You can also drill down to get to the individual transaction.

I check this out on a monthly basis to see what our biggest spending categories are to share on Couple Money.

Net Worth Spreadsheet

It’s a great exercise to help us see where we’re doing well and what we can improve on. I use the template from Consumerism Commentary (can’t find the link for the spreadsheet now) for our net worth reviews.

The spreadsheet is pretty easy to fill out and it takes about 10 minutes to login to accounts, get the numbers, and find out what our assets and liabilities are currently.

Great New(er) Option: Manilla

I’ve been hearing about Manilla for a bit now, but it was just recently that I noticed what they offered. If you’re looking for a complete system that can pay your bills Manilla can be helpful.

Depending on who you bank with and your bills there can be a long delay from when you make payments to when they show up paid. I had an extreme example of that with my credit card as one of my banks sent out paper checks and the other one did electronic pay. The difference was a couple of weeks versus 1 day.

If your bank is like the first, then Manilla can speed up and organize your bill process.

Thoughts on Budgeting Tools

I the basic take away is this- if you don’t plan ahead, then it’s extemely difficult to get ahead. Budgeting is just a method for you to tell your money where to go.

What do you use to keep and maintain your family’s budget? What do you find to be the easiest to use and what do you find to be the most effective for your family? Besides the options I mentioned, what are your thoughts on other budgeting tools?

Photo Credit: giumaiolini

Thank you again for subscribing to Couple Money! Here some recent popular topics from the site:

Reviewing Our 2011 Budget

Elle — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:33:51 +0000

My husband and I are preparing some goals and a budget for 2012, so the first step was to review where we’re at currently.

This weekend we went through our actual spending for 2011. I used Quicken to upload our joint accounts’ information and after sorting through and categorizing the data we had our numbers.

Lessons from the Family Budget

It was kind of fun exercise - looking at all this information on the screen. Looking at the budget I noticed a few things about our finances:

Our baby expenses are less than we thought (so far). We’ve heard from others that kids can be expensive, so we bulked up our savings for the baby. Thankfully our baby girl hasn’t really affected our budget that much. Diapers are about $37 for a large box that lasts about 6 weeks. We’ll adjust our monthly budget accordingly, but we’ll keep the baby fund in place should something come up.
Automating saving is great. When we looked at our expenses they were about equal our income which at first glance confused me since our savings have grown. However when you look closer, savings is built into our budget, so we were socking away cash.
We have more irregular bills than I thought. Most of our bills are monthly, but we do have occasional expenses through out the year, including property taxes for the cars, life insurance premiums, and pool HOA dues. When looking ta the yearly totals and then diving it by 12, it comes out to about $57/month. That’s a nice chunk of change!

Of course everyone’s budget is different so our lesson are probably different than yours. However, looking at your actual saving and spending habits can be enlightening.

Looking at Our 2012 Budget

Tonight we’re going to talk about what goals we have for 2012. In regards to the budget I’m going to suggest the following:

Budget more giving. I’m happy to see that including giving into our budget has been a success. I think we can increase it for 2012. How much, I don’t know yet. I’m hoping we can see a spot where we can cut back just a bit and instead direct it to worthy cause.
Speed up paying down the student loan. We have a student loan that’s the only non-mortgage debt that we have and I really want to get rid of it sooner rather than later.

What we decide to do with our budget for 2012, I’ll update it here later. If you have any suggestions for financial goals and budget ideas, please leave a comment here today. I’ll bring it up when we sit down and chat about our family’s finances.

Thoughts on the Family Budget

Have you looked at your budget recently? Did you have any surprises about what you’re actually spending?

Photo Credit: mynameisharsha

Thank you again for subscribing to Couple Money! Here some recent popular topics from the site:

Review Your Bills and Bank Statements

Elle — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:55:00 +0000

This is a money saving tip for the 50/50 Challenge.

Today’s tip should take more than 20 minutes to do. If you can just get out your bills and bank statements for the last month and review them, you may be able to save yourself a bit of money or plug a money leak. I want to share two stories showing why it’s important.

Cable Bill- Scary Jump In Price

This happened to me last year and it still shocks me how off the customer service representative was. Basically we moved from our apartment to our town-home and I was looking for a deal through our cable company. At the time we were paying around $50/month, using Time Warner cable and internet and Skype as our land line. As we called to transfer service to the new place, the customer service representative helpfully mentioned that for a mere $10/month more, we can substantially upgrade our cable.

The bill wasn’t $60-$70 as I expected, it was $140.23. $140. For just cable and internet. Ridiculous. Fortunately we got everything fixed; it was just annoying to have this mix-up in the first place.

When you check your bills, make sure you what you’re being charged for is the service you receive.

Hidden Fees on My Checking Account

Another story about reviewing statements involves my business checking account for a while ago. I noticed a $5/month charge to my account a while back that I didn’t remember signing up for. It turns out that it was a fee for downloading account information for Quicken. First off, I was a bit annoyed that it was a fee just to download the information. Plus not being told about it when I grabbed the file was a bit shady. I decided that the ‘service’ was not worth it to me.

A simple email to customer service was able to adjust this to my account. It’s not huge amount saved, but it comes out to $60/year for about 10 minutes of effort, not bad.

Checking Bills and Bank Statements

I don’t think that banks and cable companies are out to get customers (ok, maybe a little ) but I do know that nobody cares about our money like we do. It’s up to us to keep an eye out. Have you’ve been able to save money by checking out your bills for extra charges? Have you had fees removed from your checking account?

Photo Credit: Michael David Pedersen

Thank you again for subscribing to Couple Money! Here some recent popular topics from the site: