Honestly, It took me a few years to figure out how to plan our families meals, budget for them, grocery shop, and not get so overwhelmed that I don't have a life. Trust me, there are people out there who write blog upon blog about this stuff, and they're talented, sure, but I don't know how they have a life. One lady I watched a YouTube video on described every receipt, coupon that must be logged by hand each day. There were folders and calculators and a check book ledger. I was so stressed out watching her video that I pretty much gave up then.
We've always wanted to do a budget, but didn't know how to realistically do it. I can't work Excel to save my life and my husband, God bless him, didn't always remember where he spent money or where his receipts would go. We each had a way in our minds of doing it, but it just never hit the paper.
This summer, I was determined to figure it all out. I had "pinned" a bunch of budgeting stuff on Pinterest, because, really that's the first step in everything these days.;) I found everything from that said woman in the above story, to Dave Ramsey, to SAHM's who made up their own. I printed off a ton of budget spreadsheets and narrowed it down to the few I thought would work for us.
Next, I got writing out each of our income for the month plus our expenses. It got tricky with things we only pay 1x a year like property taxes, our chiro bill, or a random trip to the doctor. I didn't know what to do with these items. MINT to the rescue.
We have had a MINT account online for a few years, but I just never really played around with it to see if it would work for us. Plus, it never synced all of our accounts and I would always get too frustrated with my computer to figure it out. Well, Nathan quickly figured that out and we got our account up and running. Mint is an online budget tool that can link to all of your accounts (checking, savings, online savings/checking, etc, mortgage, etc) and then you can set up custom budgets for your money. You can even set up goals and a way to track if you're saving enough for a vacation. It sends you emails if you are over your set budget or near it.
My absolute favorite thing about Mint is that it has an app where I can easily add purchases I make with cash. I can even tell it what category to pull from. Neither one of us likes to carry cash or envelopes (which is why Dave Ramsey wasn't going to work for us) but I wrote in a budget for each of us to have "fun money" each month. When we purchase from that with either cash or our acct, I can tell it to pull from "Kelli cash", etc. That way, I'm not buying things for myself from Target each month and saying, "Oh, it's all apart of the Target budget."
At the end of the month, I get an email with where my money went in some sort of graph. I can rework the budgets if I find we are not using our fast food budget, but going over in restaurant spending each month. I haven't figured out a penalty for us by going over a budget yet though. Right now, I just look at it and think, "well, shoot!" But overall, I have found it holds me accountable. I check Mint daily and if I make a cash purchase, I put it in immediately. For example, I love iced coffee. I would buy it everyday from Bread Co. if I could but at $2.10 that adds up. So whenever I get it, which is now only about 1x a week, if that, I keep my receipt until I open the Mint app and plug it in. If I use cash, I put in what I bought, how much, that it was cash, and I tag it to "Kelli cash". That way, it comes out of that fun money budget. Otherwise, I would just put it in fast food or restaurants, but that didn't seem 100% right to me. It needed to pain me a little so I wouldn't just buy one every day.
Each month, I can go into Mint and see if we ended in the red or black and what our past months look like. I love that I can go in this month and add a Christmas spending budget. That way, I will spend less in other areas to make up for that one. My goal is to eventually print off each month's ending graphs and compare to prepare for the coming year. I haven't fully utilized the goal setting part yet, but plan to so we can go on vacation. I think too many people rely on just coming up with the money without really haven't a budget of where it will come from.
Keeping receipts wasn't going to work for us and seriously, who has time to write stuff down daily? I needed something that would work in the background daily for us and where I could also check in with the app and add cash expenses. I am also committed to looking at it every Sunday to see where we are at.
Budgeting this way has worked well for us, but if you don't like it, use the pen and paper method! That is truly my crutch but the meal planning and grocery shopping was already hand written so I gave up trying to do the budget that way.
Oh and did I mention Mint is FREE! Here's the link: Mint website
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