Fer The Awesome

Up next, the budget!!!

Creating a budget can be……not fun. But also quite the eye opener if you’ve never done one.

I know I lived for years without one, and then a few more years without one while married. We just spend money and pretty much lived check to check for years. We were then introduced to Financial Peace years ago and absolutely loved it. Admittedly we have fallen away from it but we kind of go by its core ideas. So much of your income is dedicated to Bills and Necessities. A smaller portion goes to Savings, and then the rest is for spending.

But if you’re not regulating it less and less goes to savings, and more and more goes to spending.

For a few years now Liz and I were both working. Together we were doing pretty well. Our Savings is….comfortable.

But now that I’m no longer working, and Liz is solely supporting us, it’s time to get that budget going again, to make sure we’re being responsible.

The goal should always be to increase your savings as time goes on. Not depleat it.

There are two ways to do that. 1. increase income. 2. Decrease spending. Duh, right?

Well, it’s not that easy, but it can be fun. And it all starts with recording present income and spending. Again, if you’ve never done this before, prepare for a shock. Most people don’t really know how much money they’re throwing away on the daily, not to mention, monthly.

Being a little rusty at this, my first step is record all of last month’s spending and break it up into Necessary Spending (Bills, Gas, Groceries), Savings, and Personal Spending, and see where the percentages land. Be right back….

Okay…..see….I thought we were doing okay but after running the numbers, we are currently spending 86% of our income on Necessities….that’s high. It should be closer to 50%. Everyone should pick their own number but we kind of shoot for the 50/30/20 rule mixed in there with Financial Peace.

Currently we are putting nothing in Savings and spending 11% on wants or frivolous stuff. Which means 3% is doing nothing. I could move that over to Savings but that’s the last of my concerns right now.

Yes, Necessities or necessary but obviously I need to do some trimming there. I would be a large portion of that is food. Hang on, lemme run those numbers…..

Well, we spend 33% of our Necessity money on food. I don’t know how I feel about that. We eat fake meat which is more expensive than a meat diet and we also dabble in Keto which is more expensive than regular bread products. And we try to get fresh veggies over frozen so……all of those choices lead to a more expensive grocery tab…..that being said, I could be using coupons. I could be bargain shopping. I could be doing a lot to bring that tab down.

This will be the focus for a while. Even if got rid of all food spending, Necessities would still be at 57% so I do need to also be looking for cheaper options for gas, water, and internet and stuff like that.

Alright, anyways…food.

The best way to know where to start is to next tally all grocery receipts and know where most of the money is going. That’s a lot of work tho…..

Let’s call this Part 1