My husband and I have been married for 6 years, and I'm the one who handles the finances in our house. We've never been "budget down to the dollar" people- I keep a spreadsheet of bills and when they are due, if they've been paid, etc. so I can make sure we have enough in the account for what's coming out, but haven't really tracked our general spending.
The last few months have been hard-- we accumulated a little credit card debt that I've been trying to pay down aggressively ($300/mo), had some large medical bills (another $300/month), etc. We made some changes-- cut cable, switched internet service providers to a much cheaper plan, etc. However, it's still felt like we keep coming up short-- at some point during each month the money runs out and I've had to dip into savings to tide us over to the next week's paycheck.
So finally I decided to bite the bullet and actually map out our money. I used my spreadsheet to calculate how much we're paying for bills on average each month, and how much income we are bringing in. Income - bills = $2000. Obviously some of that goes to things like gas, groceries, dog food, etc... but it still felt like we should have money to spare.
I pulled all the transactions from our bank statement for the last 5 months (April 1 - September 1.) I started coming through-- how often are we buying gas? How much are we spending? Groceries? Kindle books (my eternal weakness is reading)?
Today I finally went through and marked all the "eating out" charges-- based on our card numbers I indicated which were my husband's solo meals, my solo meals, and our meals out together.
Ka-ching. Now I know where our money is going. We are spending SO MUCH MONEY on eating out. It doesn't seem like a lot at the time but all those small charges for lunches add up! I at least eat at home 3-4 days a week for lunch, but my husband still picks up fast food even if he's running home to let the dog out. Add in all the evenings when I don't feel like cooking (and my husband's cooking skill consists of "Mac & cheese or ramen noodles?") so we order in, and literally hundreds of dollars a month are going to eating out. At least that explains why our grocery bills are so reasonable.
I guess this weekend the husband and I will be sitting down to talk about how we can change our habits-- for our physical and financial health, I don't think we can continue down this road.
They say ignorance is bliss-- but don't let ignorance come between you and true control over your personal finances. My eyes are opened now. I still don't know that I will be come a down-to-the-dollar budgeter, but at least I'm going to pay closer attention to the trends in our spending.
Submitted September 22, 2017 at 01:16PM by sarahhopefully http://ift.tt/2xYMhCU
