A New Budget

I've always been lousy at budgeting. I even took a Personal & Family Finance course in college; it taught me how to create a budget, but I hated doing it. It never turned out even remotely close to what I planned.

The idea there was to estimate how much money would be coming in; then you allocate money to all the important things (bills, tithes, rent, etc.) and then allocate the rest of it to your other pre-determined categories. I did it for two months. Two months was the required length of time to get full credit on the assignment.

Instead, I've decided to handle things paycheck by paycheck. I'll write down how much comes in. Then, I'll subtract the givens. We have our given expenses divided into two categories; half of them are set up to automatically take place the first two weeks of the month, and the remainder we take care of the last weeks of the month. This will give me a good idea of what's left to play with.

I can vary our grocery bill quite a lot by paying attention to how much we have to work with. My hope is that I'll not only see exactly where money is going, but have a lot more control over it.

I'll let you know how it goes.