When Stuart went to talk to my parents about proposing to me, their one stipulation was that we take Financial Peace before we get married. I'm not gonna lie, I was NOT excited about it. Luckily, the class grew on me. I quickly learned that my love for math would make me a lover of budgets. I would geek out over calculating everything down to the last penny but my follow-through was not so enthusiastic.
We entered our marriage with all of the knowledge we needed to be financially responsible but we just didn't have the will power. I wasn't working at the time so I spent a lot of time at home alone with nothing to do. I was always stressed out that we never had money... I mean we were always counting down the days until pay day and then going and doing all the things we had wanted to do before pay day and then we'd be back to square one. It was a vicious cycle that made me physically sick. I decided to look into couponing. Now, you could not have told me at 20 that I would have been clipping coupons and scouring sales circulars by 22 but I did it because I was desperate.
I quickly learned that the things we were buying, specifically at the grocery store, were things that we didn't ever have to pay full price for! It was like an addiction. But we still weren't spending wisely and we honestly still couldn't tell you where most of Stuart's paychecks were going.
I still kept finding ways to cut costs around the house but it wasn't making a huge difference. I started making my own laundry detergent and added "CVSing" to my weekly couponing adventures.
Fast forward to recently and we are honestly still not where we want to be. It is not nearly as bad as it was before because I now work two jobs but we stink at budgeting! So this week, I tightened my belt and sat down and created these
Yes that is a Lilly Pulitzer print and yes I did spend the time to make my own budget sheets. When we decided to put a "family budget meeting" on the calendar, I decided that it needed to be something that we would keep up and that meant that I needed a binder. We needed to be able to refer to other months for certain things and we needed to have places to save receipts and bills. I scoured Pinterest for budget binder printables but I just didn't find any free ones that I liked and frankly I think its completely backwards to have to PAY for the forms to put together a BUDGET binder. Ever since I've gotten my Mac, I have loved playing around with Pages so this was actually really fun to design.
I plan to create a binder that we can put each month's budget in and keep it handy so that we can refer to it every pay day when we have to pay bills. I'm also adding a calendar of every month so that we can schedule things like what bills need to be payed when and special things like our alotted one date night a month. I also created a sheet that is a "checkbook register" for each of our accounts so we can start receipt tracking. It looks a little like this
The budgeting process for us is going to be long and slow process. It's probably going to be painful at some points and we are guaranteed to bicker over things like how much "fun" money each of us gets and "yes we do need to buy groceries every week"(we seriously have that conversation EVERY TIME I get my grocery store "stuff" together! We would live off Ramen and OJ if it was his choice!) But the thing that counts is that we're both committed to buckling down and working through it together.
Do you struggle with monthly household budgeting? What are some easy ways that you handle spending, saving, and giving?
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