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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
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Getting Back on Track with Our Finances
Matt and I spent a very long time monitoring every last penny that we had and how we spent it. There was a time when I was on maternity leave and a time when I was only working part-time, so that I could volunteer to get Montessori For All up and running. We were also trying to send Henry to Montessori school and save up money to build a house. It was a stressful period. Once we got through it, we both had full-time jobs, our mortgage was just a little more than our rent, and both our children were at a public school.
Now that we have more… Read More -
Budget Update
I wanted to check back in about how our new budget monitoring is going. Here’s the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.- I am loving Mint.com. The app is particularly helpful because it is super easy to use on a daily basis to stay on top of our expenses. It doesn’t always categorize things the way we want to categorize them (for example, it says P.Terry’s is “fast food” and we just want to lump it under our general “Restaurant” expenses). Getting everything into the right category is integral to monitoring our budgets in the right way.
- In addition to categorizing certain expenses, I like to look at the
