Last Week's Challenge: Keep Track of Spending for a Month

When we first got married and money was tight, I was an obsessive budget-er and money tracker. Rich would go buy something at lunch and I'd be asking him the next morning what he bought at Home Depot for $27 (really no fun when he was trying to surprise me!). Unfortunately, as cash became less tight we stopped tracking it so closely, and then we moved overseas and the whole thing just fell apart. We were dealing with two currencies and lots of reimbursement, and were doing a cash-only accounting. We had sold both of our cars and had our housing paid for, so we always had a lot of money in our bank account when we went to the ATM, so we didn't feel like we needed to bother with a budget.

Gone are those carefree days now that we are back in America and don't have the cushy perks of the expat life. We had been back for six months when we decided it was probably time to set a budget and stick to it. I spent nearly a full day over Christmas break entering into Moneydance (a money management software program similar to Quicken) and we took a hard look at October, which seemed like what might be a typical month for the rest of the near future. We spent a massive amount of money! And not just on noble things like home improvement or food storage. No, masses of money went to fast food, clothing, books, entertainment, and that ubiquitous category I labeled groceries (that really included all the random stuff I felt like we needed from Target, Walmart and Costco).

As I was looking at the history, Rich was looking to the future, trying to figure out how much money we need to save for things like a second car, a bigger house, the kids' college tuition, missions, my grad school tuition (when I go back to school someday!), etc. Let's just say if we saved the amounts we would need for all of that stuff, we would barely bea ble to eat every month. This was a very sobering realization after feeling for so long like we had a lot of cash to throw around. So we decided that the kids would have to pay for part of their college and missions, and we would wait a while for that second car, larger house and grad school. We came up with a budget based on our spending in October that included savings for vacations and gifts, date night and entertainment, while cutting back on the throw-away stuff we were spending our money on. So far so good. Rich had to stop his attic project he's been working on because he spent his home improvement budget the first week of January. And I have stopped myself from buying stuff we don't really need at all those dangerous "grocery" places to stay within our grocery budget that is much less this month than we spent in October! I'm anxious to see, when I have a minute to sit down and figure it out, how we've done so far in January. I'll keep you posted.