A couple weeks ago you should've started to keep track of all your spending and/or categorized the last few month's of credit and bank statements. You should also have documented your net income, or an estimate of that.
Now the fun (to me anyhow) part. Budgeting. Now, as with pirate rules, these are merely guidelines, and if you find you suddenly need more food every month, then you change your budget. It's a living document, if you will.
I use YNAB for our daily budgeting needs. It works as both a ledger and a budget. There's 4 main rules, but I'll let you go to the site to read all about them.
But I started off with a spreadsheet. I wrote down a bunch of categories (rent, groceries, utilities, etc), and in the beginning, I separated EVERYTHING (utilities were the biggest beast there). And that was a good idea in the beginning, so that I could see where I could cut back.
Your homework this week is to summarize all your categories and add/group them together. You should have your monthly spend, and your monthly income. Hopefully, your spending is not more than your income each month. If it does, then you need to take some pretty drastic measures to get that in line, because it means you are living above your means, and that will come back and bit you big time.
We'll talk more next week on how to build out your budget. It's meant to align with your values and priorities so that you're spending on what's important to you, not just spending (and yes, loving shoes can be a priority).
Love,
Mama
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The total last time was $154,740.05. Current total is $153,977.43. We paid off $762.62.
Amount
|
Payoff
|
%
|
Min. Pmt
|
Notes
| |
Car Loan
|
$15,776.74
|
3 year - 12/2020
|
2.24%
|
$ 541
| |
401k
|
$33,126.69
|
20 year - 5/2032
|
3.25%
|
$ 227
|
Must pay off in full
|
T Alaska Visa
|
$18,216.89
|
10/2018
|
0.0%
|
$ 210
|
0% until 10/2018
|
HELOC
|
$86,857.11
|
10 year 2027
|
3.99%
|
$ 366
| |
Al Alaska visa
|
-
|
5/2019
|
3.99%
|
$ 150
|
You'll notice the Al Alaska visa card went to $0. We moved that to the HELOC, mostly because they were annoying me and the interest rate is the same. It also lowers our monthly minimum by a lot so we'll hopefully be throwing more money at things.
