Now that Joshua and I have finished our undergrad degrees, we have moved into a lovely little house and are making grown up plans for our future (post graduate school, which we are both working on right now). With big-kid lives come big-kid responsibilities (Spiderman, anyone?). Therefore, when the number of our bills increased, I began looking for a way to track them and maintain a budget. I started looking into pre-fab organizers at the store and came upon this one at Target, made by Mead.
I really liked the way that this was organized with a folder for receipts, a page to fill in your household budget, and a sheet for listing and tracking expenses. It was all very logical to me and seemed simple enough to accommodate the structure of how our new little family works. However, this particular organizer is $14.99. A little rich for my blood. I kept going back and looking at it thinking I could make the price drop with my Jedi mind powers. No such luck. BUT I noticed today while I was drooling over it that on the packaging there was a website where you could download replacement pages (the organizer comes stocked for 12 months upon purchase).
I went to the website when I got home and found out that not only where the exact pages from the planner available online (I figured they were probably a simplified downloadable version), but they were free! You didn't even have to have proof of purchase of the organizer to access them. Here is the website where they can be found.
So, instead of shucking out $15 for the pretty (yet expensive) Mead book, I downloaded the pages for free (which are in PDF format, so I can edit them in illustrator if I want to customize them. There's the benefit of a four year degree in Graphic Design. w00t). I bought a $4 8-pocket-folder from Target ($3 with a Target Web Coupon for $1 off an Up and Up product of $3 or more) that has pockets and label tabs to hold my newly downloaded sheets along with bills as they come in the mail. This way, everything is in one place and is organized and clearly labeled when it comes time for me to pay bills. I'm super excited to use my new system (it's nerdy, I know, but school supplies make my heart flutter).
This is the result:
Sorry for the crappy lighting. I'm really bad about being patient enough to wait for natural light, so a lot of times my blog photos look like myspace pictures (imagine the typical camera-in-view standing in front of a mirror kissy-face pose)
I reformatted the downloadable pages to only include the categories that I thought Joshua and I would use, so I was able to get the budget to fit onto one page instead of two. Then, for each category I printed out an edited version of the expense tracker page so that we could keep track of how much was spent in each respective category and make sure that we didn't go over the budgeted amount. The folder that I bought has four pocket pages, each with a tab and a folder pocket on either side of the plastic sheet. I slid the budget sheet and the expense sheets (paper clipped together) into the front side of the pocket, and on the back I placed an envelope to gather receipts from the recorded purchases (I have a thing for labeling inanimate objects with "Hello, my name is" name tags. I think feel like it gives them a personality, and it makes me giggle), and a binder clip to hold bills that will need to be paid throughout the month. Because the folder has four pockets I will be able to view and record four months at a time, and when it gets filled up, I'll just remove and file away the sheets, as well as any receipts that we might need when we file our taxes for the year, and then print out new sheets for the next month.
I am really excited about this new system, and I think it's going to work really well for Joshua and me. The hope is that by tracking our spending more closely, we will be able to pay off debts more quickly and *crosses fingers* start squirreling some money away for our future plans. *sigh* A girl can dream, right?
What is your favorite way to organize bills/budgets? Are you the person who handles the finances in your family, or do you and your partner share the responsibility? I'm always fascinated to hear how other people handle money and the balance that they are able to achieve in their lives :)
xoxo Alyssa
*coming soon* HOUSE TOUR! (at least a partial one)
3 comments:
How do I budget?
First of all, we put everything possible on cards that are paid off right away, and on a weekly basis I'll use Mint to make sure all the transactions are properly categorized.
Then, I start with how much income we'll have in a given month, and then subtract all of our planned savings and recurring bills(which are paid/saved automatically, on the card if possible). There's only one bill that has any variability, and it won't vary too much, so with a conservative estimate there I have a number that I'll use for everything else. I could break that out by a bunch of categories(gas, groceries, dining out, clothes, entertainment, etc), but save for separating out gas(which I can pinpoint thanks to months of previous data from Mint), I find it easier to say "we have X dollars to live on day to day" when thinking about the mental accounting stuff("can I afford to do this?"). Any income from side projects goes straight to savings.
Hopefully that makes sense.
We discovered that sitting down together and working on our budget is the best thing. I am a total number geek, so I love doing all the math and planning parts of our budget, and Tyler is the one that actually pays the bills, so we work together to figure out all of the amounts for each category.
We are working as hard as we can right now to build up our savings, so we allot as huge of a chunk as we can to savings. After it gets to the point that we want it to be, we will put a huge amount into paying off our car, which doesn't have much left at all.
We also have found it useful to use cash for buying food, my gas, and for our "allowance" that we both get each month. It works out really well, because those are the easiest categories for us to overspend in, so we just know that when the cash is gone, it's gone.
I think I should write a post about budgeting too! I love it, it makes me feel like I have so much less stress and tons more freedom!
This is brilliant Alyssa. I also use Mint and find it a great tool that helps me keep up on what I've spent when I can't find receipts. But I also have been thinking about keeping a paper copy of budgeting, but I didn't know how to start that. Thanks for your post!
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