Whew! I just made it. I barely made getting June's income/expense report up in July. I think I've decided that next month I'm not going to wait until I get my bank statement (since it usually arrives after the 15th), and instead, reconcile with my online statement so I can get a better handle on where the money's going. What happens to Basil and me is that we have a good month, and then celebrate the next month, yet we don't realize how much we've spent until yet another month's almost gone by. We used to try to go over expenses weekly, but that kind of got away from us, too.
Unfortunately, as you can see, we ended up in the negative this month. But that can be explained by the purchase of a car and registration for Number One Son to take to college. We also had an airline ticket for Number Two Son to fly to visit his father for the summer.
The good news is that we quit randomly driving around and combined errands, so our gas went down $60 for the month. Basil had a lot of art income, but that was mostly spent on art expenses, supplies and for when his parents visited, but hopefully in the future a bigger cut of that should go toward the credit cards.
We kept groceries down to around $400 which is where we want to be, but that could be because for one week of the month there were only two of us. Also dining was cut by half to $236 (but I'm afraid that July's will be back up).
Entertainment was high because of Basil's family visiting.
Gifts Given was high because there are A LOT of birthdays in my family in June including mine, two of my sons, three of my sisters, and a friend's. Add to that that Basil's brother graduated from high school and I think we did pretty well in the gift giving department.
Everything else is pretty normal, but car insurance will be going up with an additional car $60 a month. We're hoping to change our cell phone package to try to get that lower, but with four people in a family plan, I don't think $142 is too bad, especially since we don't have a land line we're also paying for.
Hopefully next month I'll get July's budget up much quicker, because we've got to get this debt paid down, plus save for a wedding in the next 11 months. I think we're going to implement a budget through Quicken and see if that helps us.
2 comments:
Do you already have Quicken? If you don't, I would recommend trying some sort of free budgeting software before you shell out the money. I've played with Pearbudget a bit, which is a nice Excel spreadsheet (I don't know if it works in Open Office as well) someone made up for budgeting and put online.
We already have Quicken, although it's an older version, otherwise I'd really never get this thing done. Maybe I'll check out the Pearbudget as well.
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