Having more money helps with budgeting
Here we are, halfway through the month and I’m beginning to realize just how difficult this budget thing really is. Keeping up with the daily expenditures is a full-time job. I’m going to have to look into something like Mint or even Dave Ramsey’s Every Dollar budget tracking app to make my life both easier and hugely more accurate.
Then again, there wouldn’t be as much to log in if we didn’t spend so much money….
The first month of any budget implementation is a tough one. Unless you both are on-board right from the get-go, the first month is all about “discovery”. Discovery is what you get when you don’t change your spending habits as you should when implementing a budget, but yet you still document all of your expenditures, as you should when implementing a budget. Calling it Discovery is just a nice way of labeling it as “Shock and awe”, or “Holy crap!, where the hell did our money go”. No matter what you want to call it, it’s an education.
In my budget, I wasn’t able to implement groceries and dining out into my expenses. It’s not like we don’t eat. It’s just that there was very little money to stick in that category and to be honest, I had no clue what we were spending for food, from any source. I’m getting a better idea now, as you can imagine. So that means that no matter how good we thought we would be with our money, we have a long way to go to counter the damage even buying a Snickers bar would do to our finely tuned budget.
One thing that I discovered was that it is extremely difficult to be accurate in your expenditure reporting if you don’t keep a ledger of your expenditures. I know that this just sounds stupid, but what I mean is that because I’m going off of my checking account, and I’m posting these debits in batches, I tend to forget if I had logged “$X amount from Wednesday” in or not. It was easy in the beginning as I could remember what I did and didn’t do. But now that we are 15 days into this, and many, many transactions down the road, my memory isn’t what I thought it was at the beginning of the month.
What does this mean for this month, now that I’m already so far into it? Nothing bad really. It just means that I need to go back and log all of the transactions that we have had up until now, then clear out my budget template, and start all over again. No biggie.
Oy vey…. And I’m not even Jewish…
So this will be the fun that I get to do tonight. First I have to clean up the check ledger that is attached to the budget template that I have adopted as my own. I also have to add a bunch more lines to it as it clearly cannot handle the amount for transactions from the likes of this family. Next I’ll have to go through from my predetermined starting date until now and log all of the transactions that we have had. Keeping in mind date on which we had them is important as I am separating the debits by weeks as I am with the credits. I also need to keep the category in mind as well.
Well golly, this should be a hoot.
Dave
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