A Grownup Budget

For the first time in my life I sat down and did a seri­ous monthly bud­get. Lit­er­ally. K and I have finally reached the point where liv­ing pay­check to pay­check, build­ing up sav­ing only to empty it out unex­pect­edly, is unac­cept­able and we’re ded­i­cated to mak­ing this bud­get work.

Here’s how we did it.

1. Col­lect infor­ma­tion. We saved every gro­cery receipt since Jan­u­ary. We have the bills for all of our util­i­ties and such avail­able so that we can look back and project where the costs will be next month.
2. Orga­nize it on the cal­en­dar. First we put all bills due on the cal­en­dar for the upcom­ing months to allow us to see when what is due in rela­tion to when we’re expect­ing in income.
3. Spread­sheet! We broke out a Google spread­sheet to list every item in income and spend­ing, as well as plan­ning for sav­ings, inci­den­tal and unex­pected costs, etc.
4. Try it. We’ve laid out our bud­get in June. We don’t expect it to be per­fect but we do expect it to be a start. We’re going to save every receipt in June, count every penny we spend.
5. Evolve. Based on how June goes we’re going to mod­ify it and go again.

We ended the night both excited about the prospect of build­ing a sav­ing and pay­ing off our debts. How­ever, that being said, we both unan­i­mously hate grow­ing up.