Our Budget

So, ever since this blog has started I've gotten tons of inquiries into my personal budget. I feel like I am pretty comfortable talking about finances by now, and I have no problem discussing my own financial decisions. The trouble is, I doubt my budget numbers will help you much. Even if you have the exact same number of people in your family, who are the same ages, who eat the same amount, and have the same medical and dietary needs as my family does, the likelihood that you also have the same income, the same monthly bills, the same dreams and saving aspirations...in any case the probability that your budget will be or should be the same as ours is very small.

However, I can understand the reasons between wanting to know what another person's budget is, if only to get ideas when you are a beginning budgeter. So, I am going to post our monthly budget below. I had my husband whip up a little spreadsheet that had our budget on it, and then he converted each of our budget categories into a percentage of our monthly income. I feel like this will be a lot more helpful to you when trying to write your own budgets. Then, he sorted it from the highest percentages to the lowest so we could see what we spent the most money on. It actually was a really enlightening experience for us, so thank you for asking about our budget! Haha.

Here it is:

Rent		20.6%
Taxes		16.3%
Savings		13.7%
Charitable		10.9%
Groceries		6.9%
Misc		5.3%
Health Savings		4.0%
Medical Insurance		3.2%
Phone		2.9%
Luke		2.7%
Auto Fuel		2.7%
Electricity		2.2%
Insurance		1.8%
Gas		1.7%
TV		1.4%
Internet		1.4%
Prescriptions		1.1%
Dental		0.6%
Vision		0.3%
Life Insurance		0.2%
TOTAL EXPENSE		100.00%

You will notice that we don't have budget categories for dining out or entertainment. However, we do have a category called miscellaneous. Let me explain, when we first started budgeting we budgeted out literally every dollar into categories. What happened is that when something came up (and something always does) like we need an oil change, new tire, out of toilet paper, someone gets sick etc. we had nowhere to put the extra expense and ended up trying soooo hard and never staying under budget. Nothing is more frustrating than working really hard to keep to your budget and ending up over anyways. Pretty much every time this happened I wanted to quit completely. I would cry like a baby and say "we tried so hard," sniff, sniff, "I don't understand." sniff, sigh. So we decided to do away with extra "fun" categories and have one miscellaneous category. So how it works for us is that if we don't have something come up (speeding ticket, etc.) then we have money to go out to dinner or see a movie or buy some clothes or whatever. The way this works out for us is that some months we are able to do a few fun "extra" things, and some months we don't go out to eat etc. at all. But the good news is that since we have switched to this method we haven't gone over budget at all! woot woot!

Also, I do not view living on a budget as a trade off for having family fun and making family memories together. Not even close. I am all about fun and traditions and as you follow this blog you will see more details on how we do that. You can go out and not spend money. 

The two line items that I am the most proud of in our budget are our savings and our charitable contributions which come to 24.6% of our monthly income each month.

The items which are the hardest for me to stomach every month are TV, Internet and Cell Phones which combined equal out to 5.7% of our monthly income. Can't live without them though. Sigh.

I just have to say that staying out of debt and living on a budget has been a huge blessing in our family. It can be really hard. I can't even tell you how many times I have wanted to give up.... way too many. But like all things that require hard work it is so worth it.  Get on a budget. Get rid of debt. Gather a great savings. You won't believe the peace and freedom it will bring you.

Let me know if you have any other questions on our budget and i'll do my best to answer them.

Happy budgeting!