Well thought I would post my numbers for everyone to see. February was the first month I tried to track everything, but in doing this I noticed I missed some categories, so I will be adding them to our tracking for March. I still think I managed to capture about 90% maybe 95% of all our spending. I do have one question though for readers, when tracking your spending do you track spending for items like shipping, items you need for other "business". For example we sell guitars sometimes, well my DH does, he might need to purchase strings, so we buy those, then he sells/ships the guitar and I take only the true "profit" and count this as income. Should I be tracking that as well? And what about our rentals, anything we pay for above and beyond should be tracked? And what about items I'm reimbursed for? Like my cable bill, it was 62.63 but I'm reimbursed for $46 dollars of that? Any suggestions would be welcomed!
I'm still working some of this out, but here's my totals, first number is budget, second is actual spent:
I haven't included all the mortgage payments either, they are on my master budget spreadsheet, but not much I can do about those, they are what they are and included in my master.
Groceries $400/$247
Childcare $200/$200
Pet $30/$16
Cable $62.63/$62.63
Utilities gas $125/$292 - I forgot to pay Jan's so this amount is double what I would have spent.
Electric - $130/$126
Water - $45/$43.20
Cell - $104/$103.27
Dining - $100/$166.90
Auto fuel - $120/$135.16
Auto/insurance - $530.68/$530.68
Timeshare - $60.22/$139.70 - had to pay yearly property taxes this month
Home Repair - $25/$14.20
Life Insurance $58/58
School - $10/20
Medical - $142/58.68
DH misc- $100/119.51
cigs - $100/153.83 - I did buy some lozenges and will work on getting rid of this habit.
Household $50/147.97
entertainment $100/132.77
My misc - $70/67
Some we were over, some under, overall we came pretty close to our budget, the goal for this month is to reduce our total budget by $200 - we should be able to do this. Cutting costs from household, cig's and reducing/staying within our budgets. We'll see! I already started tracking everything again!
February totals - so much!
March 2nd, 2008 at 07:11 pm
March 4th, 2008 at 08:46 am 1204620409
March 4th, 2008 at 03:24 pm 1204644242