Budgeting 2019
My husband and I are fairly frugal people. Admittedly we like to travel and we aren’t the type to spend our lives in front of a video game every night, we like adventure. We don’t have cable, we have a reasonable bills, and get a little thrill out of finding the best deal (or promo code) available.
As we were reviewing the 2018 figures and planning for 2019, we were not quite satisfied with how we financially ended this year. We were hit with a couple of large bills, but it seemed we could have made more progress on paying down the house or eliminating some of our debt. We use mint to track our spending and have a general budget, but if we want to save more money, we would have to start watching the pennies.
For most of us, debt isn’t one big bill or a huge investment that goes awry. It’s in the ‘Oh, it’s just $10′, ‘That’s not bad for $20′, ‘Well I don’t really need it, but it’s only $5′ range of spending. It’s that extra trip to the grocery store for milk that turns into $60, the extra toys that were on sale, all the extras ‘stuff’ we didn’t need, but wanted. All those extras add up quick, and if it’s on a credit card, it keeps adding up every month until it’s paid off. We wanted to get to that place where we could break our connection with our convenience (aka credit) card and replace it with cash. Start being proactive instead of always being reactive.
What if we made a game of it? What if I turned myself into a Frugalista and gave myself a tight budget? Many families live on much less than we do, what if we took a leaner approach to our life – just how much money could we cut out of our budget? Could we stick with a really tight budget for a year? Why the heck not. What’s the worst that could happen?
Looking over last year’s budget, there wasn’t a lot I could do with our fixed expenses – mortgage, water, power, my son’s preschool, our monthly non-work retirement, and Young Master V’s college account has to be paid every month. But our variable expenses – groceries, home improvement, clothing, adventure, restaurants… the stuff of life, those could be slashed.
2018 budget was $1400, first round of cuts brought it down to $1200, second round $1100. Next morning over coffee. I showed Alien Daddy (AD) the budget I’d come up with, we talked about our financial goals for the year and sitting down at the kitchen table over coffee, AD and I cut some more. We ended up with $960 as our total variable budget for the month, which includes food for two adults and a three-year-old. Last year we spent on average $800 a month for groceries/eating out/work lunches so this would be a bit of a challenge!
Although the budget finalized at $960, we agreed we would put aside the $140 in final cuts and any money we saved into our emergency fund, and use that extra money quarterly to pay down our debt. Challenge issued. I’ll post a monthly update to see how close we come!
