Well we survived our first month of the envelope budget system-some areas were great and others...well not so much. Derek and I decided to reign in our spending in order to see how we are really spending our money. In order to do this I sat down and estimated our monthly spending in areas like groceries, gas, medical, and miscellaneous. After a budget meeting we decided to get cash out for groceries, gas, medical, miscellaneous spending (anything that didn't fit into a category), entertainment, and several other categories. We were pleasantly surprised at the end of the month!!! We actually had money left over in the grocery, gas, and entertainment envelopes-it's amazing how little you want to spend when it is cash!! Even the kids didn't want to burn through the entertainment money once they realized that once it was gone we were done. Our biggest expenditures for this past month were medical bills-yikes!!! We went over by almost $242 which was unexpected!!! And since we had to put Daisy to sleep that pushed our misc. over as well.
I am proud to share that we are now credit card debt FREE FREE FREE!!!! This month we are going to use the same system and continue to track what we are spending. It is exciting to see that we already have $100 saved towards a summer vacation and we have money saved for school clothes next fall. It is definately nice to see the debt gone and it is a wonderful life lesson for the kids to see-a working budget in action.
The kids are not the proud recipiants of a weekly allowance from which they tithe, save, and have spending money. I could write an entire post on the wonders of holding on to your own money while wanting to spend all of Moms!!!! Funny how nothing at Walmart looks as good when the expectation is in place to spend that allowance!! Peris is saving for a special new shirt with her short term savings and I will bet that this shirt won't be left wadded on the floor-it is good to see them learning as well.
So we're off to the bank so we can fill up our envelopes for this new month of April. Way to go Story family!!! I love it when we work together to make our family even better.
1 comment:
I love this! Thankfully we don't have credit card debt but I was going through the finances trying to decide if we can afford a new(er) vehicle and am amazed how much we burn through with nothing to show for it. (It's really, since Paco only works, me. I do all the shopping for us. Bad bad bad.)
I'm going to try your envelope method with groceries this month. Wal-Mart makes things way too easy to overspend!
Good luck to you happy family! Hopefully you'll have no extra medical expenses this month!
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