Do you follow a budget?

newmommy74

Friends are always saying that they need to tighten their budget or making some type of comments about their budgets and I must admit that I have never done one (apart from 12 years ago when we brought our first home!)!

I know what our incomes are and what our outgoing expenses etc are. So now that we are planning on building a new home though I am thinking that we should start doing one.

If you have one, do you follow it? Any tips?

LauraLynneC

we loosely follow one...

One great tool we use is mint.com - free to use, very easy to set up and use!

Step one is to figure out where your money IS going - then you can figure out where you WANT it to go. 

 

**Maggiepoo**

We follow one very closely now because I am trying to figure out what we need to do so I can be a SAHM (very soon I hope) so I know where everything we spend goes. We also use Mint.com and it is really helpful. It takes all of your purchases and puts it in to categories for you so you can see where your money is going, it also send you e-mail updates each week of where you stand with each category (ie: you are over by $10 in your gas category, or you have $220 left in your grocery category). 

Before the quest to stay home we never followed any type of budget, I just kind of knew how much we had but didn't pay too much attention. Now I kind of like knowing where our money is going, it really opened up my eyes to our spending habits. The only downside is now DH thinks its really cool and checks it so I have to watch my shopping habit.

EllaB_04

We've had a budget since before we were married. Nothing fancy, just an excel spreadsheet with all expenses, fun money, holiday/birthday budgets, and monthly allocations for long term savings goals (new car, house, etc). Historically, we didn't stick to it 100%, but I am very confident that simply having one has helped us meet alot of financial goals, just because it made us much more aware of our spending. Now that I'm going to SAH, I'm planning to become super diligent at following the budget, as we won't have the excess funds for wiggle room that we have now.

Brynnie2010

We also use mint.com.  We used to just pay attention to how much money we had in our account and discussed what we wanted to spend it on.  Using mint.com hasn't necessarily saved us money because we were pretty good about always depositing 10% of our income into savings, but because it shows you exactly how you spend money, we've started spending less money on fast food and dining out, and have been able to make some purchases that are more important to us.  

mishquiche

Yes, we do.  It's the only way we can make it work for me to be a SAHM.  We use Mint.com as well and it's very easy.  It's amazing (and often frightening) to see where your money goes.

jcyahne

EllaB_04:

We've had a budget since before we were married. Nothing fancy, just an excel spreadsheet with all expenses, fun money, holiday/birthday budgets, and monthly allocations for long term savings goals (new car, house, etc). Historically, we didn't stick to it 100%, but I am very confident that simply having one has helped us meet alot of financial goals, just because it made us much more aware of our spending. Now that I'm going to SAH, I'm planning to become super diligent at following the budget, as we won't have the excess funds for wiggle room that we have now.

This exactly!  I started our budget when DH and I were 19 and he moved out on his own.   We've pretty much been doing the same thing month after month ever since...and we're 32/33 now.

Kathzoo

We've had one for a few years.  I adored entering things by hand into Excel every week before DD.  Now we use mint.com.  It has helped us make our categories more detailed and still gives me my budget "fix".