December 2018 Budget - Real Numbers on Paper and Every Dollar App - Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University - Baby Step 0
Hello all!
Welcome to my blog, or welcome back if you've been here before! This is going to be a long one. Go get a mug of tea or coffee, and then come back. I'll be here.
I've been talking about our financial situation until I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing about it, but right now, it's a very important thing going on in our lives. Our current total debt is $46,049.46 (including our car). Our normal net income, together is around $2800 a month.
I'm so excited for how much peace I am feeling after my husband and I sat down and did this budget TOGETHER on paper.
To catch you up, if you're new, we are on Dave Ramsey's Baby Step 0, which is not often talked about. Basically it's the steps you have to take to get current on everything before you start Baby Step 1. My husband recently changed jobs after being unemployed for 3 months, so we have a lot of past due stuff, and now that our net income is at least $1000 less month than we used to bring in, it's not so easy to just catch up.
So, even though December will be practically half over before our first paycheck for this month comes in, we have to do the budget this way until we can get caught up to a point that we can pay the first half of a month's bills with the last paychecks of the previous month. That may take a few months.
So, we got the print outs that I had found on Stacey Flowers' budget videos, like her Dec Budget With Me Live video. and started with the Quick Start Budget page.
The Quick Start page does not care about income. It only cares about your "Four Walls", as Stacey puts it. I've not read the FPU program, and am just going on the information I had gotten from You Tubers and other people, but I did read part of the Total Money Makeover years ago (wish I'd paid more attention) Apparently this is all based on Dave Ramsey's teachings, and he knows what he's doing, and I sure don't. So I'm going with his plan here. Some of it is self explanatory, but notice I have rent down twice. That's because as of today, I have still not paid December's rent, and it was due Dec 1st, with a 5 day grace period. So now, it's late, and there will be a $25 late fee. I hate that. So, we determined before dealing with any debt, that we're going to pay December's rent of course, but also get January's paid before January starts, so that is completely current. By the way, our rent is only $158 because we own a mobile home on a lot in a mobile home park, and we paid off the house ($37,000 whew!) last year, so now we just have lot rent.
Another thing that may seem odd is that I put "Internet" under Transportation even though it has its own slot under Utilities. For me Internet is my transportation because I use it to get to work, and it just felt right to put it there. It is actually bundled into our cable and house phone and home security system, but I did get the bill lowered quite a bit from what it was, and we agreed since we don't have any other entertainment and not even pocket money right now, that having the basic X1 package is worth it for both of our sanity. We watch it a LOT (though rarely together unfortunately).
We are not currently tithing because we're still in Baby Step 0. When we move to Baby Step 1, we'll start tithing. We both believe it totally makes a difference. We've seen it before, but we fell off the wagon, and look where we are now.
We put $300 for groceries, because we're trying to do $100 per person all month, and there's 3 of us - though the budget does also include household items, so technically it's not even $100 per person. But we did it on $168 the last paycheck, so I think we can do it. Also included in the Four Walls is clothing, and some people may balk at that, I totally get where this is coming from. My husband needs more clothes for work. He had one pair of jeans that fits him well and are in good enough shape to wear to work, until we finally got him a second pair last week, and not very many shirts that fit the dress code (he mostly owns graphic tees, since he recently gained a lot of weight and can't fit into his old clothes). Also, his shoes he's been wearing to work are wearing out. So, I shopped around all over the Internet looking for something that would work for him, and found a pair of Dr Martens leather shoes in a wide style with the nice rubber sole on clearance for $49.99, and I got a $5 coupon for signing up for emails, so I figured up what they should cost, then we added $20 to get him more shirts and $20 to get me some long sleeve shirts I actually like - my winter wardrobe hasn't been updated in like YEARS - and I am going to spend mine in thrift stores only. Then we also added $20 to get the kiddo more long sleeve shirts, since they wore out or outgrew most of theirs.
The prescriptions line is over the counter stuff Hubby needs like aspirin and I think an Omega 3 or something, which he said he figured would come to $15. The $10 for Porchie I put under medical because we decided that making him happy in his final days is a priority, so we budgeted $10 just for tuna for him. We're pretty sure in January, we'll probably decide to go ahead and put him down, but we'll have him with us through the New Year if he holds out, at least. He has cancer in his sinuses, and he has bad days, but also good days when he acts like nothing's wrong and eats like a horse and even plays, so we're letting him tell us when the time is right, for now.
So, that gives us a good idea of what our Four Walls cost, though of course, we're making two rent payments on this one, and getting my husband those shoes. I'm praying electricity won't be more than $200. It was $152 last month, and I'm keeping the thermostat at 69 degrees and making everyone wear sweaters and use blankets on the couch, so I'm hoping we'll be okay.
Then we move on to the Monthly Cash Flow Plan...
Now the Cash Flow Plan includes the exact same information as the Quick Start Budget, though it's spread out in different boxed, but it also adds everything else, like tuition, personal expenses, and then debt. This doesn't tell you WHEN the money is going places, just WHERE you're telling it to go. The tuition is for the kiddo's homeschool program. Gifts includes $50 for Christmas presents and $20 for my daughter's wedding gift. She's getting married on December 22nd. As you'll see further down (this is a very long blog), this did get updated slightly when we punched all of this into the Every Dollar App, and we find a little more money to actually get them what we had wanted to get them for $59 (and I just found out we might get another 20-25% off of that!). The $50 for Christmas is because we have 9 people to buy for, but we already have gifts for 2 of them, and we decided on $10 per person. So that leaves $70, but we racked up $20 in rewards on the One Main website and redeemed them for Amazon gift cards, so we were able to take the budget down to just $50. We could have told the family we weren't giving any gifts at all this year, but we had already gotten a couple of gifts that weren't really more than $10, so we decided we'd go without pocket money or have a little less in something else, just to make sure we could get everyone at least something they would hopefully like. So each gift will be very intentional.
And then it gets into the debt. As you can see, there are so many creditors! It never bothered me when hubby has his previous job, but it should have! We had no savings. I should not have been carrying any debt with no savings, and to be honest, this isn't even all of them. We refinanced two loans to get them current and they worked with us, and we got to skip December's payment for both of them. One is Lendmark, and the other is One Main. So Hubby and I each have a Credit Central account, which is a small personal loan company. Then he also has a Service Loan account, which is actually right next door to Credit Central in the strip mall, and I have a World Finance loan which is on the other side of Service Loan in the same strip mall. They also just added a One Main office in the same strip mall. It's ridiculous people! I cannot WAIT for the day when I can drive past that strip mall and not owe any of them a single red cent! For credit cards, we have a Walmart card, which I originally got just to keep in case we needed tires for the car in an emergency, but you guessed it, I maxed it. I got a Discover card, with a $3200 limit, which I didn't even touch for a long time, but Kevin Smith was going to be in Knoxville and so his show at the Bijou, so we got tickets, and I booked a hotel room within walking distance, and the three of us ate at a nice restaurant each day and went to the mall and Market Square, and the Highland Games, and racked up a lot of charges. But I had a plan to make several large, like $500, payments in a row to get it paid off quickly, but the next month, my husband quit his job. Man, I wish we hadn't racked up so much debt on the card, but it WAS a very memorable weekend.
The AF247 is a cash advance company basically, but it's all done online. I guess it's more like a seriously expensive line of credit. I hated to do it, but during the time that he was not bringing home ANY income, I had to get money somewhere, and our credit was shot and we just had my income, so I knew the bank was not going to talk to us. Oh, and there's another personal loan company not on here too, that we both missed originally, but we decided it's going to have to wait until January, then we'll add it back in.
Care Credit has my daughter's name next to it because she promised to pay that one for me, because several months ago, we let her use the card to get her dog fixed and get his shots. We did since use it to take Porchie to the vet, as well as Oscar, but she said she'll take care of the whole balance, but it might just be minimum payments some months. I said that was fine. She paid $100 at first to get it current and then she's paid minimums for a couple months.
By the time we got to this point in the budget, I had to get to work, so I showed my hubby the list of who we owe and what the minimum payments are, and told him he got to figure out who got paid. I didn't think we'd have enough to cover everyone, but we did (allllllmost)! I was astounded! I thought surely after putting so much into gifts and clothing etc, that we wouldn't have enough to cover all of those minimum payments.
So, besides the personal loan we're not worrying about until January, our income this month covered everything except $132, which I allotted to the Discover bill since it's not actually due again until January 2nd. But fortunately, the fiasco with our HSA bank worked itself out and I got reimbursed the $167 I had to pay out of pocket for one of my husband's prescriptions (90 day supply). So, that covers the rest of the Discover bill and leaves a little bit left over. We decided to put the extra money toward our daughter's wedding gift, so we can get her the thing we really wanted to get her (them). So, I'm really happy about that.
Those numbers haven't been updated on the paper copies. I may or may not do that, since we're also using the Every Dollar app from Dave Ramsey (it's free!), and we just added the correct amounts in there. I'll probably update the paper ones, or else, it'll bug me lol.
Ok, so that's where all the money is going, now we had to decide what was getting paid from each paycheck...
There are four Allocated Spending pages. These pages are important, and we'll have to refer to them every time one of us gets paid to see what we need to pay from that paycheck. So, the app is good for tracking and letting us know what's left in each category, but these pages are the real meat of the budget.
I filled these out after I got off work and Hubby had gone to work. At the top is has a place for "Pay Period Dates" - but you don't put down the dates that your paycheck covers (like my Dec 15th check will be for Nov 26-Dec 10) - instead, you put the days of the month from when you get paid until the day before your next income. So, the first check just shows 12/13 - 12/14, because Hubby gets paid on the 13th, but I get paid on the 15th. So the second check column shows 12/15-12/26 since my husband's next check comes in on the 27th. I hope that makes sense. It took me a minute to get that. Then you just enter the amount you think you're going to get on that check. With my husband's checks, we know what his should be because of an app his employer uses and he can check to see exactly what he's earned so far and what he'll bring home if he works his exact schedule. For mine, I've worked there long enough to get an idea of what I'll make depending on how many hours I get. Mine varies so much, though, since I get paid on the 15th and last day, a check can be for 80 hours or sometimes 110 if it's a long month and I work a holiday.
So, the way you use these pages, is you start with the amount of the check at the top of the first column and start subtracting whatever you're going to pay that first week. There's a column for amount you're going to pay and next to it, you keep a running balance. You keep going in that column until you get to 0, then stop. Then you start with the next check and do the same with it, keeping a running balance until you get to 0.
As you can see below for PAC Credit Central, I only put $4.50 toward that bill from the 2nd check, but then I put $95.50 on it the next check. Of course, I won't go into Credit Central and pay them $4.50. I'll wait until the next check comes in and I have the total amount, and then go pay it. So, it's very important that we stick to this budget exactly, and track everything so we make sure we have the money in the bank when it needs to be there.
You can see in the note I added on the side up there, I only had $25 to put on Discover when we wrote this out, and we still needed $132 to get a Zero Budget, but that was covered by the HSA reimbursement. Also, Hubby says it's a possibility he'll have another whole day on his 2nd paycheck in December, so if he does, then we'll make a payment to that personal loan company we forgot to add to the budget this month. And if not, then it'll just wait. If we don't have it, we don't have it. Four Walls come first.
So, as I mentioned, we not only did this on paper, but we also got the Every Dollar App from Dave Ramsey. It free, and we found it in both the Apple app store and the Google Play store. The best part, is you can log into your account on a browser on your computer too, and all phones and browsers logged into the same account all update each other, and they sync quickly and smoothly. This is like the budget app I wish I'd had YEARS ago. I've tried YNAB, but it just didn't work with how my brain worked. So, I just stuck to paper, and even carry a little black Moleskine notebook to write down every single purchase or expense whether it's from checking or cash or whatever. But if Hubby spent money on something, I would just find out when I checked the bank's website, or when he told me he couldn't get a gallon of milk afterall because he'd already spent all of that $20 I gave him 3 days ago. But now, we both have the app logged into the same account, and he's been very good about using it. I think it really helps that he had such a big part in doing the budget this month.
So, here's what it looks like on my desktop...
So, there's a line for each paycheck, and I could edit those, so I could name them whatever I wanted. I also added a line for the HSA reimbursement, and also a line for the money we had left in the bank from November (I'm kind a proud we actually had money left over!)
In the one above, you can see for Restaurants, we had budgeted $20.00, but it shows remaining is only $14.52. Hubby entered in the money he spent at McDonalds to get something for lunch because there weren't a lot of leftovers from dinner for him to take with him, so he grabbed a combo meal. So, now when he needs to eat out again, he can quickly see the amount he has remaining to spend on that. We have promised ourselves we're not going to rob from one category to spend in another if we can help it. It has to be a serious need, and we have to sit down and discuss it first. it will not be done on a whim, and it will not be done by just one of us, it has to be agreed upon. It seems so strange to have him be so active in the money stuff, but it's AWESOME!
I figured up what the wedding gift would cost with tax if we don't get a discount. But Hubby is supposed to get a 20% off discount or maybe even a coupon for 25% off, sometime before the wedding, so we're just going to hold off until then and see if we can save a little on that. If so, then any money we save from the wedding gift, we could put onto any Christmas gifts we hadn't picked up yet - if any. If there's no more gifts to buy, we may roll it over into restaurants or maybe a little more for groceries since I will actually need to make a big family meal for the 21st when we have the whole family here for our Christmas gift exchange and dinner the night before the wedding. My 2nd oldest daughter won't be able to be here after the day of the wedding, so we have to do Christmas early. We're not doing a big traditional Christmas meal though. I'll probably do a meatloaf or two since it's everyone's favorite, and the fixins. Then on Christmas Day, my oldest daughter is making Christmas dinner for all the family still in town (which will be most of them), since she and her husband both have that day off work, and I think my hubby will too, since all their employers are closed that day (I *think*), but I do work that evening, but I get double pay for it! Such is the life of Customer Service.
Once you get it to where you've got a zeroed out budget, you get the "It's an EveryDollar Budget" checkmark line appear under the date. That was pretty cool.
So, there ya go. Completely real and transparent. I felt like there wasn't much to hide. If I can help someone else by sharing our actual budget, and how we're living during Baby Step 0, then I'm glad to do it. If anyone has any questions, please leave a comment. If you can't get the comment thing to work (I've heard some people have had problems with it, sorry, I think it's a Google thing), then please email me at pattyann.campbell@gmail.com, and I'll be glad to answer any questions you may have. I am also up for any advice you want to give as well!
Thank you for reading, especially if you actually got this far! I'll try to post again later today or at least tomorrow with a small life update. We did some Christmas decorating, kiddo went to a youth group meeting, and we found a new church I think, oh and my oldest got a promotion! So, check back for that update soon!
Y'all have a great day!
Patty
Welcome to my blog, or welcome back if you've been here before! This is going to be a long one. Go get a mug of tea or coffee, and then come back. I'll be here.
I've been talking about our financial situation until I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing about it, but right now, it's a very important thing going on in our lives. Our current total debt is $46,049.46 (including our car). Our normal net income, together is around $2800 a month.
I'm so excited for how much peace I am feeling after my husband and I sat down and did this budget TOGETHER on paper.
To catch you up, if you're new, we are on Dave Ramsey's Baby Step 0, which is not often talked about. Basically it's the steps you have to take to get current on everything before you start Baby Step 1. My husband recently changed jobs after being unemployed for 3 months, so we have a lot of past due stuff, and now that our net income is at least $1000 less month than we used to bring in, it's not so easy to just catch up.
So, even though December will be practically half over before our first paycheck for this month comes in, we have to do the budget this way until we can get caught up to a point that we can pay the first half of a month's bills with the last paychecks of the previous month. That may take a few months.
So, we got the print outs that I had found on Stacey Flowers' budget videos, like her Dec Budget With Me Live video. and started with the Quick Start Budget page.
The Quick Start page does not care about income. It only cares about your "Four Walls", as Stacey puts it. I've not read the FPU program, and am just going on the information I had gotten from You Tubers and other people, but I did read part of the Total Money Makeover years ago (wish I'd paid more attention) Apparently this is all based on Dave Ramsey's teachings, and he knows what he's doing, and I sure don't. So I'm going with his plan here. Some of it is self explanatory, but notice I have rent down twice. That's because as of today, I have still not paid December's rent, and it was due Dec 1st, with a 5 day grace period. So now, it's late, and there will be a $25 late fee. I hate that. So, we determined before dealing with any debt, that we're going to pay December's rent of course, but also get January's paid before January starts, so that is completely current. By the way, our rent is only $158 because we own a mobile home on a lot in a mobile home park, and we paid off the house ($37,000 whew!) last year, so now we just have lot rent.
Another thing that may seem odd is that I put "Internet" under Transportation even though it has its own slot under Utilities. For me Internet is my transportation because I use it to get to work, and it just felt right to put it there. It is actually bundled into our cable and house phone and home security system, but I did get the bill lowered quite a bit from what it was, and we agreed since we don't have any other entertainment and not even pocket money right now, that having the basic X1 package is worth it for both of our sanity. We watch it a LOT (though rarely together unfortunately).
We are not currently tithing because we're still in Baby Step 0. When we move to Baby Step 1, we'll start tithing. We both believe it totally makes a difference. We've seen it before, but we fell off the wagon, and look where we are now.
We put $300 for groceries, because we're trying to do $100 per person all month, and there's 3 of us - though the budget does also include household items, so technically it's not even $100 per person. But we did it on $168 the last paycheck, so I think we can do it. Also included in the Four Walls is clothing, and some people may balk at that, I totally get where this is coming from. My husband needs more clothes for work. He had one pair of jeans that fits him well and are in good enough shape to wear to work, until we finally got him a second pair last week, and not very many shirts that fit the dress code (he mostly owns graphic tees, since he recently gained a lot of weight and can't fit into his old clothes). Also, his shoes he's been wearing to work are wearing out. So, I shopped around all over the Internet looking for something that would work for him, and found a pair of Dr Martens leather shoes in a wide style with the nice rubber sole on clearance for $49.99, and I got a $5 coupon for signing up for emails, so I figured up what they should cost, then we added $20 to get him more shirts and $20 to get me some long sleeve shirts I actually like - my winter wardrobe hasn't been updated in like YEARS - and I am going to spend mine in thrift stores only. Then we also added $20 to get the kiddo more long sleeve shirts, since they wore out or outgrew most of theirs.
The prescriptions line is over the counter stuff Hubby needs like aspirin and I think an Omega 3 or something, which he said he figured would come to $15. The $10 for Porchie I put under medical because we decided that making him happy in his final days is a priority, so we budgeted $10 just for tuna for him. We're pretty sure in January, we'll probably decide to go ahead and put him down, but we'll have him with us through the New Year if he holds out, at least. He has cancer in his sinuses, and he has bad days, but also good days when he acts like nothing's wrong and eats like a horse and even plays, so we're letting him tell us when the time is right, for now.
So, that gives us a good idea of what our Four Walls cost, though of course, we're making two rent payments on this one, and getting my husband those shoes. I'm praying electricity won't be more than $200. It was $152 last month, and I'm keeping the thermostat at 69 degrees and making everyone wear sweaters and use blankets on the couch, so I'm hoping we'll be okay.
Then we move on to the Monthly Cash Flow Plan...
Now the Cash Flow Plan includes the exact same information as the Quick Start Budget, though it's spread out in different boxed, but it also adds everything else, like tuition, personal expenses, and then debt. This doesn't tell you WHEN the money is going places, just WHERE you're telling it to go. The tuition is for the kiddo's homeschool program. Gifts includes $50 for Christmas presents and $20 for my daughter's wedding gift. She's getting married on December 22nd. As you'll see further down (this is a very long blog), this did get updated slightly when we punched all of this into the Every Dollar App, and we find a little more money to actually get them what we had wanted to get them for $59 (and I just found out we might get another 20-25% off of that!). The $50 for Christmas is because we have 9 people to buy for, but we already have gifts for 2 of them, and we decided on $10 per person. So that leaves $70, but we racked up $20 in rewards on the One Main website and redeemed them for Amazon gift cards, so we were able to take the budget down to just $50. We could have told the family we weren't giving any gifts at all this year, but we had already gotten a couple of gifts that weren't really more than $10, so we decided we'd go without pocket money or have a little less in something else, just to make sure we could get everyone at least something they would hopefully like. So each gift will be very intentional.
And then it gets into the debt. As you can see, there are so many creditors! It never bothered me when hubby has his previous job, but it should have! We had no savings. I should not have been carrying any debt with no savings, and to be honest, this isn't even all of them. We refinanced two loans to get them current and they worked with us, and we got to skip December's payment for both of them. One is Lendmark, and the other is One Main. So Hubby and I each have a Credit Central account, which is a small personal loan company. Then he also has a Service Loan account, which is actually right next door to Credit Central in the strip mall, and I have a World Finance loan which is on the other side of Service Loan in the same strip mall. They also just added a One Main office in the same strip mall. It's ridiculous people! I cannot WAIT for the day when I can drive past that strip mall and not owe any of them a single red cent! For credit cards, we have a Walmart card, which I originally got just to keep in case we needed tires for the car in an emergency, but you guessed it, I maxed it. I got a Discover card, with a $3200 limit, which I didn't even touch for a long time, but Kevin Smith was going to be in Knoxville and so his show at the Bijou, so we got tickets, and I booked a hotel room within walking distance, and the three of us ate at a nice restaurant each day and went to the mall and Market Square, and the Highland Games, and racked up a lot of charges. But I had a plan to make several large, like $500, payments in a row to get it paid off quickly, but the next month, my husband quit his job. Man, I wish we hadn't racked up so much debt on the card, but it WAS a very memorable weekend.
The AF247 is a cash advance company basically, but it's all done online. I guess it's more like a seriously expensive line of credit. I hated to do it, but during the time that he was not bringing home ANY income, I had to get money somewhere, and our credit was shot and we just had my income, so I knew the bank was not going to talk to us. Oh, and there's another personal loan company not on here too, that we both missed originally, but we decided it's going to have to wait until January, then we'll add it back in.
Care Credit has my daughter's name next to it because she promised to pay that one for me, because several months ago, we let her use the card to get her dog fixed and get his shots. We did since use it to take Porchie to the vet, as well as Oscar, but she said she'll take care of the whole balance, but it might just be minimum payments some months. I said that was fine. She paid $100 at first to get it current and then she's paid minimums for a couple months.
By the time we got to this point in the budget, I had to get to work, so I showed my hubby the list of who we owe and what the minimum payments are, and told him he got to figure out who got paid. I didn't think we'd have enough to cover everyone, but we did (allllllmost)! I was astounded! I thought surely after putting so much into gifts and clothing etc, that we wouldn't have enough to cover all of those minimum payments.
So, besides the personal loan we're not worrying about until January, our income this month covered everything except $132, which I allotted to the Discover bill since it's not actually due again until January 2nd. But fortunately, the fiasco with our HSA bank worked itself out and I got reimbursed the $167 I had to pay out of pocket for one of my husband's prescriptions (90 day supply). So, that covers the rest of the Discover bill and leaves a little bit left over. We decided to put the extra money toward our daughter's wedding gift, so we can get her the thing we really wanted to get her (them). So, I'm really happy about that.
Those numbers haven't been updated on the paper copies. I may or may not do that, since we're also using the Every Dollar app from Dave Ramsey (it's free!), and we just added the correct amounts in there. I'll probably update the paper ones, or else, it'll bug me lol.
Ok, so that's where all the money is going, now we had to decide what was getting paid from each paycheck...
There are four Allocated Spending pages. These pages are important, and we'll have to refer to them every time one of us gets paid to see what we need to pay from that paycheck. So, the app is good for tracking and letting us know what's left in each category, but these pages are the real meat of the budget.
I filled these out after I got off work and Hubby had gone to work. At the top is has a place for "Pay Period Dates" - but you don't put down the dates that your paycheck covers (like my Dec 15th check will be for Nov 26-Dec 10) - instead, you put the days of the month from when you get paid until the day before your next income. So, the first check just shows 12/13 - 12/14, because Hubby gets paid on the 13th, but I get paid on the 15th. So the second check column shows 12/15-12/26 since my husband's next check comes in on the 27th. I hope that makes sense. It took me a minute to get that. Then you just enter the amount you think you're going to get on that check. With my husband's checks, we know what his should be because of an app his employer uses and he can check to see exactly what he's earned so far and what he'll bring home if he works his exact schedule. For mine, I've worked there long enough to get an idea of what I'll make depending on how many hours I get. Mine varies so much, though, since I get paid on the 15th and last day, a check can be for 80 hours or sometimes 110 if it's a long month and I work a holiday.
So, the way you use these pages, is you start with the amount of the check at the top of the first column and start subtracting whatever you're going to pay that first week. There's a column for amount you're going to pay and next to it, you keep a running balance. You keep going in that column until you get to 0, then stop. Then you start with the next check and do the same with it, keeping a running balance until you get to 0.
As you can see below for PAC Credit Central, I only put $4.50 toward that bill from the 2nd check, but then I put $95.50 on it the next check. Of course, I won't go into Credit Central and pay them $4.50. I'll wait until the next check comes in and I have the total amount, and then go pay it. So, it's very important that we stick to this budget exactly, and track everything so we make sure we have the money in the bank when it needs to be there.
You can see in the note I added on the side up there, I only had $25 to put on Discover when we wrote this out, and we still needed $132 to get a Zero Budget, but that was covered by the HSA reimbursement. Also, Hubby says it's a possibility he'll have another whole day on his 2nd paycheck in December, so if he does, then we'll make a payment to that personal loan company we forgot to add to the budget this month. And if not, then it'll just wait. If we don't have it, we don't have it. Four Walls come first.
So, as I mentioned, we not only did this on paper, but we also got the Every Dollar App from Dave Ramsey. It free, and we found it in both the Apple app store and the Google Play store. The best part, is you can log into your account on a browser on your computer too, and all phones and browsers logged into the same account all update each other, and they sync quickly and smoothly. This is like the budget app I wish I'd had YEARS ago. I've tried YNAB, but it just didn't work with how my brain worked. So, I just stuck to paper, and even carry a little black Moleskine notebook to write down every single purchase or expense whether it's from checking or cash or whatever. But if Hubby spent money on something, I would just find out when I checked the bank's website, or when he told me he couldn't get a gallon of milk afterall because he'd already spent all of that $20 I gave him 3 days ago. But now, we both have the app logged into the same account, and he's been very good about using it. I think it really helps that he had such a big part in doing the budget this month.
So, here's what it looks like on my desktop...
In the one above, you can see for Restaurants, we had budgeted $20.00, but it shows remaining is only $14.52. Hubby entered in the money he spent at McDonalds to get something for lunch because there weren't a lot of leftovers from dinner for him to take with him, so he grabbed a combo meal. So, now when he needs to eat out again, he can quickly see the amount he has remaining to spend on that. We have promised ourselves we're not going to rob from one category to spend in another if we can help it. It has to be a serious need, and we have to sit down and discuss it first. it will not be done on a whim, and it will not be done by just one of us, it has to be agreed upon. It seems so strange to have him be so active in the money stuff, but it's AWESOME!
I figured up what the wedding gift would cost with tax if we don't get a discount. But Hubby is supposed to get a 20% off discount or maybe even a coupon for 25% off, sometime before the wedding, so we're just going to hold off until then and see if we can save a little on that. If so, then any money we save from the wedding gift, we could put onto any Christmas gifts we hadn't picked up yet - if any. If there's no more gifts to buy, we may roll it over into restaurants or maybe a little more for groceries since I will actually need to make a big family meal for the 21st when we have the whole family here for our Christmas gift exchange and dinner the night before the wedding. My 2nd oldest daughter won't be able to be here after the day of the wedding, so we have to do Christmas early. We're not doing a big traditional Christmas meal though. I'll probably do a meatloaf or two since it's everyone's favorite, and the fixins. Then on Christmas Day, my oldest daughter is making Christmas dinner for all the family still in town (which will be most of them), since she and her husband both have that day off work, and I think my hubby will too, since all their employers are closed that day (I *think*), but I do work that evening, but I get double pay for it! Such is the life of Customer Service.
Once you get it to where you've got a zeroed out budget, you get the "It's an EveryDollar Budget" checkmark line appear under the date. That was pretty cool.
So, there ya go. Completely real and transparent. I felt like there wasn't much to hide. If I can help someone else by sharing our actual budget, and how we're living during Baby Step 0, then I'm glad to do it. If anyone has any questions, please leave a comment. If you can't get the comment thing to work (I've heard some people have had problems with it, sorry, I think it's a Google thing), then please email me at pattyann.campbell@gmail.com, and I'll be glad to answer any questions you may have. I am also up for any advice you want to give as well!
Thank you for reading, especially if you actually got this far! I'll try to post again later today or at least tomorrow with a small life update. We did some Christmas decorating, kiddo went to a youth group meeting, and we found a new church I think, oh and my oldest got a promotion! So, check back for that update soon!
Y'all have a great day!
Patty
Budgeting like this will be second nature to you before long!
ReplyDeleteHi Crystal! Yeah, I am really loving this system. It fits how my brain works. And I love that my husband is totally on board and using the App all the time. I'm excited!
DeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteLong time lurker here, just thinking out loud.
Do you have a plan for what to pay off first? Dave Ramsey's plan says to pay smallest first to see progress. That makes sense to me. Having payments going out in less directions seems like it would reduce stress and also the various fees and errands that go with each.
Or, are you going to unload the one, AF247, you referred to as really high interest first?
Maybe it would be encouraging to play around with the numbers, what debt you could wipe out with a $1000 tax return, $1500, etc.
Thank you for showing the paper budget forms. They seem very useful for figuring out cash flow. I have never seen budget papers organized like that before.
Good luck to you!