Budget Preparation
Phew! I finished getting our budget ready for 2018. Here’s my process:
- Look at our previous year’s budget in Google sheets. (I have one column that specifies what the category is called in Mint.com, what the item is, how much it costs per month, and notes about how I arrived at that cost per month).
- Cross check each line item by looking at the past several credit card statements. I need to make sure we are actually spending what we say we are spending.
- Pepper Matt with questions about new charges that have been added to the budget over the year (like donations to the ACLU).
- Update our income in the same budget document.
- Make adjustments to our budget so that the total expenses (including money that goes into specific savings accounts) equals our total income. I budget for every single dollar that comes in.
- Use Mint.com to set a budget for each item and each savings goal. This part is tedious if I’m committed to getting it 100% right. This year, I had to print out our budget and manually cross off each item as I checked it on Mint.
It feels good to have this ready for the 2018 year. We did not do a good job of tracking our expenses this year, but maybe 2018 will be our year! (I don’t mean to sound so noncommittal; I’m just trying to set lower expectations so I can exceed them.)
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