Budgets & money talk

I'm probably in the minority here, but I love budgeting and tracking our income/expenses every month. I find it fun :) With me losing my job in about 2 months, being strict with our spending is more important than ever. So I'm taking a closer look at what we have going out each month and how we can make some extra money & cut expenses while I'm on unemployment.

At the beginning of each month, I print out the previous month's bank statement (we only have 1 checking account which makes it easy; we also have an online saving's account that we make transfers to when we have extra money). I have an excel spreadsheet where I enter our income & expenses. It breaks down each category of expenses to help us pinpoint if we're spending too much in a certain area. I plug the items from our bank statement into the excel spreadsheet and keep my fingers crossed that we made more than we spent that month. lol. Honestly, we usually go over a little bit or just break even.

If you're looking for a less manual way of keeping track of your spending, I'd highly recommend mint.com! You enter in your bank info and any other loans/investments/etc you have and it calculates everything for you. I also use Mint, but I like having a paper copy of our monthly spending that I refer back to later, so I'm sticking with the excel spreadsheet for now :)

Here's how I have my spreadsheet broken down:

Income

• Includes wages from both our jobs, money from photography sessions and misc. income (like selling something on ebay/Craigslist)
• How to increase = Getting a raise is out of the question, so more photography and selling things we don't need/use anymore is the only way to up our income.

Home Expenses

• Mortgage, utilities, home improvement = typically eats up 50% of our income. Ouch!
• How to decrease = Re-financing our mortgage is not possible and we keep our thermostat low in the winter and high in the summer to reduce our heating/cooling bills. We can water our lawn less frequently in the summer and take quicker showers. We don't have a landline and our cellphone bill is about as cheap as it can get. We are pretty much as low as we're going to get in this category, unfortunately. Owning a home is expensive!

Food

• Grocery store & fast food/eating out = this category is always much higher than I'd like to admit, usually about 10%
• How to decrease = Meal planning and coupon clipping will really help us save on grocery store trips. This is something I really need to be diligent about; having more free time when I'm unemployed will also help me get organized in this area. We don't eat out all that often, but when we do, we should only go to places where we have a good coupon (we bought an 'Entertainment' coupon book that has many BOGO meals at restaurants in town).

Transportation

• Gas, car insurance, car repairs/maintenance = unless we have a major issue with one of our cars, we're usually at 6%
• How to decrease = Plan out our errand trips so we don't end up forgetting something and having to drive back across town again. Buy things online when it makes sense (we get free shipping & 5% off at Target by having their debit card). I plan on selling my car once I lose my job, so that will cut back on gas and insurance a bit (and increase our savings).

Entertainment

• Cable, netflix, internet = 2%
• How to decrease = I love Netflix, so I refuse to get rid of that :) We pay $21 a month for basic cable, but we never use it, so I'm thinking we can drop that. We may also lower our internet package (we have the fastest one available) to save a little more.

Health

• Doctor/dentist visits, prescriptions, life insurance = we rarely have any expense in this category besides life insurance, which is 1%
• How to decrease = Life insurance is a fixed expense, and the other items are so rare that this category is as low as it will get :)

Personal

• Health/beauty, clothes, haircuts, etc = some months we have nothing, some months we have several expenses; max of 2% for the most part
• How to decrease = Use as many coupons as possible, go through our closets to sell old clothes or re-discover items we forgot we had instead of buying new ones, look for hair cut specials on Facebook 

Financial obligations

• Credit cards, car payment, student loans = right around 15%
• How to decrease = We don't have any credit card debt, we just have a car payment and a student loan payment each month. This is a fixed expense, but I do pay a little more each month to get it paid off faster. We should have both wiped out in about 3 years. If push came to shove, I could drop back to the minimum payment to save a little.

Misc. Expenses

• This is the "junk drawer" of our budget. We track random purchases at Target/Walmart, pet expenses, gifts, post office fees, Oliver diapers/toys/etc, anything that we didn't know what category to use goes here. Fluctuates monthly, usually depending on how many Target trips we took that month :) = 10-15%
• How to decrease = We always use a dog food coupon for Maggie, but could do a little more research to find coupons for household stuff we buy each month. Buying diapers in bulk when we find a good sale is a good idea, especially if we can find coupons to use as well. Oliver's clothes/toys are usually bought used or given to us, so that saves a ton. Cutting down on shopping trips will prevent impulse buys and bringing home things we really don't need. I'd really like to start making more gifts, instead of just buying a gift or gift card, so that will require more planning/thought on my part.

Overall, I think we do pretty good at staying within our budget, but there is definitely room for improvement! I'm hoping all the extra time I'll have starting September will help get me organized and back to being more frugal. Being a working mom means I spend a lot more than I should on convenience items, a habit I'd like to discontinue ASAP.

While I'm thrilled I'll get to be a stay-at-home mom for a little while, I'm a bit nervous about our fiances and if we can make this work. It helps that we have about 3 months worth of an emergency fund and I'll be getting a payout for severance and un-used vacation time, so I'm thinking 6 months of staying home with Oliver is do-able. I've always been a frugal person so as long as I can rein in Derek's spending, I think we'll be ok :)