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My budget breakdown

August 28th, 2008 at 07:41 pm

Thanks for the advice on my last entry! Both commenters said to go with my gut when categorizing spending. Hmm...well, my gut says the barber is a household necessity like shampoo--and like shampoo, we go to the cheapest one possible ($20 each with tip). And calling the "Mortgage/utilities" category "Mortgage/utilities/telecom" allows me to lump my phone and cable in that expense while still sort of calling it out as a separate category. (Telecom fits with the level of necessity of owning a nice condo in a good neighborhood: I don't NEED to live in a nice place, nor do I NEED cellphones and high-speed Internet, but it sure is important to me.)

So my breakdown prediction for my new October budget is as follows:
Mortgage/utilities/telecom: $2044.18 (28% of take-home)
Debt repay: $2687.67 (37%)
Spending/entertainment: $1489.66 (20%)
Household/grocery: $1059.49 (15%)

I'm fairly happy with those percentages. Debt repay has gone down and spending up since the last time I really calculated it. That's because I realized after our England trip how important travel was to my family, especially me. It's a little sobering to see 20% when you add up all our discretionary spending, but I think it's worth it so far.

The Mortgage etc. category will go up in November and I'll probably take that money out of Debt repay. But if AS gets a higher-paying job eventually, I would like most of that money to go toward the debt-repay category. I'd like to see that percentage get back up over 40%, at least for a little while.

Of course I'll need to start saving for babies soon, and when/if we actually have one (or more), the household budget will go through the roof.

4 Responses to “My budget breakdown”

  1. merch Says:
    1219958631

    I didn't see your last entry but thought I would give you my 2 cents.

    First of all, I get a little nerdy on budgets. Only because of my old job I ran about $10 mill in budgets and management would want to look at a million different ways. Cost of consultants versus employees. Data licenses used in US. Travel expenses for educational purposes vs blah blah blah. You get the idea.

    This caused me to keep my budgets at a gradular level. I have a folder called Utilities and in that folders i have uenvelopes called cell phone, land phone, internet, cable, electricity, gas (to the house), water, etc. So, I basically can grab the envelopes and move them into any categorize I want without losing the underlying data. In this case I could easily tell you my expenses of essential and non-essential bills by re grouping the envelopes.

    But again, I was conditioned by a company that would ask me the weirdest questions about costs, so I designed it for maximium flexibility and minimium updating time.

  2. mom-sense Says:
    1219969513


    I, too, am struggling a bit with categories. For example, "Education": I have the contributions to prepaid college tuition for the kids, I have their present-day Catholic school tuition, I have my own student loan payment, and I have preschool for the youngest. Is education encompassing past (student loan payment) and future (prepaid college tuition)? Is Catholic school tuition the same as preschool? I still muddle around with the details.

  3. mom-sense Says:
    1219969705


    P.S. Your percentages look good, too. I also am in favor of the family vacation fund. I neglected it for years (saying we had too many kids for road travel, etc). Finally we did Disney and drove 2,500 miles round trip and it was a blast. I have about 70% of the money for our trip to NYC by train next summer to visit my SIL (well, former SIL) and do some other sight-seeing. That is now a definite top-line item. More important for me have quality family time than being completely out-of-debt (the premise that all of my funds should go to that eradication and elimination).

  4. ceejay74 Says:
    1219973567

    Totally, momsents!

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