Budget

One of the biggest focus of the past couple of months for both Matt and myself has been our budget. I can say that as long as I can remember,I knew what a budget was and usually had a budget either in my head or written on paper. Only one problem, I have always in the past viewed a budget as a guide. I plan to spend my money this way but if something else pops up or if I over spend in this area then I just juggle things. As you can probably imagine,this has lead to alot of difficulty. Over the past several month, I have really taken to heart Dave Ramsey statement "Every dollar has a name and a place." We have made adjustments to out grocery budget based on the actual amount we have been spending. And I have been really trying to keep an accurate record of where are money is going. Things are starting to come easier and make more sense and in September the plan is that we will actual have enough money to do a major home improvement and still meet all the requirements we have. Another awesome change is that Matt and I are talking not only about the budget but actual spending. So this week, I realized that we need to focus and adjust our gas budget. This has actually been an ongoing thing. Originally I budgeted $400 a month, for the past 2 months I have changed this amount to $100 a week. I have begun to notice that most weeks both of the autos need gas so I tend to go over this $100. Matt and I talked about it made a change to monitor this. Yesterday, both the car and the van needed gas. We were driving the car so we ended up filling it up, which only left $42 for use in the van. We put that amount in last night and I hope to see that we could stick to the $100 a week if we adjust our thinking just a little bit. My thought is we alternate completing filling one car one week and the the second the next. This way we should be able to stick to the $100 budget.

In other exciting budget related news- I realized last night and verified today that I actually was below budget last month for groceries because I had included a $50 gas card from Walmart in my amounts! Watching each dollar is actually helping!