Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Photo of the day: something I love

I have a love hate relationship with budgeting. I really enjoy knowing exactly what we spend and where our money goes. But, after making our monthly  budget, we have to stick to it. Unfortunately it rarely includes shopping sprees at Target.

We use the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University method to budget. Alex and I both have commission based jobs, which makes planning very difficult (our paychecks are rarely the same month to month). Which means we have to update and change our budget monthly- yes, the mortgage and typical bills stay the same, but we allow for fluctuations in our envelopes. We have cash envelopes that we use for all of our day to day spending and we budget down to the last penny. We've been doing it for about 8 months and we've paid off Alex's student loan (woohoo!!) and are working on the car now.

That being said, we have made sacrifices and have to be pretty creative. We have given up Direct TV and replaced it with Hulu and Netflix which saves a lot. We don't eat out often and we (try) to plan everything (weekends, holidays, gifts, etc.) down to the last detail. There are still some surprises we can't plan for and that's part of life, but this budget has been really great for us. There are a lot of different programs and ways to budget and this may not be the best way to budget and plan for everyone, but it works really well for us.  

Today's picture is our table on budget day, "Something I love."


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