Hey! It's Stephanie from SixFiguresUnder.com! It's time for another monthly
budget update. I've been sharing our family's personal finances since the
fall of 2013 when we were in six figures of student loan debt. Originally I
started sharing our income and expenses to help keep us on track and motivated
in our debt payoff. It's amazing how much accountability it gives us to be sharing
our goals and our progress online. I found that sharing our finances helps
break the "money is taboo" stigma. Most people learn to budget through trial and
error without ever taking a look at a real working budget, which is too bad. My
inbox tells me that you agree that it's helpful to see another family's budget
even when your numbers are totally different. In the description I'll link
to the blog post where I detail our monthly income and expenses if you want
more information. Okay let's jump into the budget for March and at the end I'll
show you how we're setting up our budget for April. So we budget based on last
month's income so at the beginning of the month we have-- right here-- all the
money that we have available to budget and the first thing we do is is pay our
tithing. If you look at this note here you can see that our tithing is based on
the income we earned in February so I keep track of it all right here in this
this little comment box so I know that this is our total and 10% of that is
what we pay in tithing. Fast offering is a donation we make each month. Our
monthly bills are pretty easy to predict. Our car insurance is about the same each
month. It went up recently. And this is for my
cell phone. My husband's is through his business but our cell phones are
through republic Wireless and I know that this this will never be more than
$18. Well unless I buy more data but it's pretty typical that it's between 13 and
17 dollars somewhere in there. Okay our mortgage.
We've got a blogpost coming up on all the details of this, but we refinanced
our mortgage and this is what our new payment will be each month is. It's a
little less than this but we like to round up and have a nice even number. But
it's not due-- our new mortgage first payment is not due-- until May 1st and so
we still budgeted this money this month but it didn't go toward the mortgage.
This was the cost of refinancing and so that leaves this $1,900 left
over. And I'm just gonna roll that over and then in April I'll budget the $3,200
and so it'll still-- this $1,900 will still-- will follow along in this
category but I'm actually going to planning to get this up to $3,200 so
that our mortgage will be two months ahead. That you know our whole budget is
a month ahead but I want the mortgage category to have to have two months
buffer in there. Internet, same every month.
Electricity varies. It was extra high this month. I know it next month it's
going to be less because I've been watching but typically it's under 300.
Home phone-- this is through Ooma it's it's internet-based so it's not not a typical
landline but it's just $4.35 a month. Our trash gets charged every other month
so this is this is half of what the bill will be when it comes next month. Same
with water get billed every other month and this is half of what-- well about half
anyway. So those are pretty standard then moving on to our everyday expenses.
Groceries I budgeted $400. At the beginning of the month we spent 330. There's a whole
video on what we bought there. And then at the end of the month we went on a
road trip and got some groceries for that. Anyway ended up spending under $400.
Gas is usually a little more than this but for our road trip I I categorize all
the the fill-ups-- the gas for the road trip-- down under our vacation
fund so this is three weeks of gas essentially. Clothing I bought a few things
not much. For categories like this probably the beginning of the month I
had I don't know $50 or $30 budgeted here so if I had say I had $50 budgeted then
at the end of the month I see that there's this $33 left some people like
to carry that over carry that money over to the next month but for these
categories where I'm funding every month I prefer to empty those out each
month so zero them out so if I only spent $16.52 I like to keep that $16.52 so
that it doesn't have any money carrying over. Then all of the the extra that I
got from spending under on these categories then that can go toward
whatever goal we're working toward and what we're working on this year is
increasing our emergency fund so that's what that went toward. I also use
excess on any of these categories to go toward other categories where I might
spend more than I had originally planned on. Like kids activities I had budgeted
less than this and ended up spending more so the money that maybe I had
toward clothing went toward kids activities. So household goods, this is
anything that's not food, that we buy for our house,
toiletries, things for kids school projects, things for the garden, things
for the kitchen, anyway things like that. This is a higher month but under $200. Fun,
this month we went out to lunch for a child's birthday. I went out with some
girlfriends for appetizers one night. I bought some microphones to go with a karaoke
machine that we were given. Animals, we have outdoor cats and chickens
so this is our chicken feed and our cat food. Kids activities were high this
month. We had to get some wrestling shoes for my son and some other
wrestling related expenses and my daughter's in a musical production. I
needed a costume for her so those are our basic everyday expenses. Next these
are our sinking funds, periodic expenses expenses that that will come up
eventually. Some of them we know exactly how much they'll be like life insurance
we know that if we put $70 a month toward our life insurance that when the
premiums are due we'll have the exact amount we need. Others we don't know like
car repair. We drive older cars and they always need something so we've
been putting $300 a month there. This month we got the oil changed
in the van and and changed the air filter ourselves so we this is what we have
remaining in that category. Medical, most of our medical things are covered except
for doctor co-pays and and prescriptions. We went to the doctor a lot of times
this month for one kid or another or myself. This is
what we have remaining in that category.
Dental, we don't use that often but we put $30 a month right now. There's 90 in there.
Car registration and smog $40 a month. Right now there's $60 for that. Birthdays and
gifts, we had a child's birthday party this month and also got gifts for that
child and the child who has birthday next month so this was a high spend
month for that category. There's still $82 in there. For Christmas we set
aside a hundred. There's currently $300 in that category and I already mentioned
life insurance. We've got some money that's still sitting there for future
home projects and furniture. We put $200 toward our road trip-- our vacation for
spring break and we spent $445 because some of
that was money we had set aside in January in February. The majority
of this is gas for driving from here to Washington and back. We also stayed in a
motel one night and we also bought some things for our trip that we'll be able
to use in future trips like a soft rooftop carrier that we really
liked and it didn't kill the gas mileage like I thought it was going to. I'll
link to that in the description below. We bought some pie irons and a new big
tarp because it was going to rain we wanted to put a floating tarp above our tent.
Anyway we have $54 left in that category and we'll we'll keep funding
that category. We've got a family reunion coming up in the summer. We started doing
allowances with our kids and I'll have a whole video and blog post on that in the
future. It looks kind of funny because we took cash out and it doesn't show. Anyway
so that's about $60 a month. We put $500 toward our emergency fund and we have we
an automatic $25 for each of our four older kids in a 529 that just goes out
automatically. This doesn't actually ever touch our hands but I just like to keep
track of it here so I add it specifically in as income so that I can
put it in here but it doesn't doesn't ever come to us. We're doing an automatic
withdrawal of $550 a month toward my IRA so that by the end of the year it will
be maxed out. I put 25% of my blog income aside for
self-employment taxes and that-- at least last year last year I put 30% aside and
it covered the taxes for both my and my husband's businesses. This is for our
tax preparer. The supplemental property taxes, you can see this is negative
here because I took the money out that was what had been carried over
because it turns out there was enough in our escrow account that escrow paid the
Supplemental property taxes which we didn't realize they were going to do so
we didn't need to pay that bill from our pocket like
we did earlier in the year so that money, when I put this negative number and then
it just popped it back up to the "available to budget" and then it went
towards something else like the emergency fund. So that pretty much sums
it up for March. Let me quickly show you what we're gonna do in April. So like
I've said, we budget a month ahead, so all the money we earned in
March is forwarded here to April's budget and I already got started on some of
these numbers. Oure tithing, we tithe on the money we earned the month before so
this is all of our income from March and we do 10% of that. Fast offering is the
same every month. Car insurance $168.18. Our phones I'm
going to go ahead and put $18 I know it will be less than that but I'll just put
that in to be safe. Our mortgage the same. Electricity I'm
going to put $300. I know it's less than that but we'll just better to have extra.
$32.16. I will put $46 for water. Groceries I'm going to put $400. I'm gonna put
car gas at $400.Clothes we'll just put $50. Household say
$150. Fun maybe $50.
Animals I'm gonna say $80. I know there's a sale on chicken feed so we might stock
up a little bit there. Kids activities I'm gonna put $100. Let's see car
repair I've been doing $300 so, $300. Medical $100. Dental $30. Car registration $40.
Birthday $40. Christmas $100. Life insurance $70. I'm not gonna put anything
in these. We'll put $200 again here. $60 again here. I'm gonna wait on the
emergency fund. I know this hundred dollars is coming out. This retirement I
just put in, this is gonna come out automatically
I already calculated these. This doesn't exist anymore.
So that puts us at $630 left toward our emergency fund goal. so I'm gonna put all
of that there so that we're at a nice zero here and everything is budgeted. And
like I said before I expect this to change. I'm not going to spend exactly
$400 on gas or exactly $150 on household goods but it's
all got to come from somewhere so if I, for some reason, need to spend $300 on
kids activities then that other $200 needs to be subtracted from other
categories in our budget. Well there you have it! There's our zero-based, month-ahead
budget for our family of seven. If you have any questions about what I
showed you here or any other budgeting questions I'm happy to answer them so
just leave them in the comments or leave a question a comment on my blog and I'll
get back to you as soon as I can!
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