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Budgeting: Early Returns
By Saver | June 24, 2008
We’re approaching the end of our first month of our attempt to track our expenses.
The good News:
1) We’ve successfully tracked all expenses so far this month. We’ve never actually accomplished that before. The web entry form has been working really well.
2) We’re significantly under budget. One of our biggest budgeted expenses is “travel”, and tomorrow we will spend that on plane tickets to Finland, for a wedding. After that, we’ll be closer to our budgeted amount but I think we’ll still be under. Yay! Now the question is whether or not we decrease our budget next month to put more money in savings and debt payoff….
The not so great news:
3) We’ve spent a lot of money on going out this month. And Spender could barely believe that more than half of it was actually times when he went out without me. After a bit of defensiveness and some attempts at justification, he admitted that he should probably be more careful about spending in those situations. This is exactly the point of having a budget and tracing expenses, so that makes me happy. I’ll be happier next month if the spending really does come down, but I’m not going to get worked up over one category when we’re doing pretty well over all.
To be honest, just the fact that we have a functioning budget on which we can base these discussions is huge progress for us. Maybe this blog really is working some magic on Spender!
Topics: Budgets/Expense tracking, Relationship, Saver's Posts | Related Posts: Expense Tracking: Using Google Spreadsheets, Free Money!, The beginnings of all things are small