Budgeting

As previously stated here, I am a planner.  I can't help myself.  I have always been the one to take care of our finances.  I have always liked math and I worked at a bank for 4 years during college so Scott just let me be the one to balance the checkbook.  Honestly, I don't know if I could have handled him doing it.  A couple of years ago when we were building our house, I kept excel spreadsheets for everything.  I then decided that I should make our budget into an excel spreadsheet.  I have no idea why it took my 5-6 years of marriage to figure this out.  It is AWESOME!  I will say that my husband now refers to me as "Budget," but I don't see him complaining when we are able to pay things off early.

One thing that really worked out well for us was "lunch money."  At the beginning of each month we each get a certain amount of money to spend on eating out during the week.  Once the money is gone, it's gone.  If you have money leftover at the end of the money, it's yours to keep.  Scott was really bad about using the debit card and never giving me the receipt, so this has really helped me out when balancing the checkbook.

My excel spreadsheet consists of multiple tabs. 

1. The first tab is where I have all of our bills listed and which paycheck they will be paid out off.  I get paid twice a month and Scott gets paid every 2 weeks so it is really crazy how I do this some times, but I found a process and it works.
2. We had no interest until 2012 on our Best Buy card so my thought was why pay a huge chunk of money at once on something you can pay on for 2 years and never miss a small amount each month.  The goal is to NEVER pay interest on a credit card.  So on another tab, I have the payment plan on this laid out until it is paid off. 
3. Then on another tab I keep a register of what is in our savings account since I don't carry around a paper register. 

I love having a plan for paying things off.  I  found some loan amortization schedules online that can be downloaded into excel.  All you have to do is plug in a few things like the loan amount and interest rate and it does the rest for you.  You can add in extra payments and it will even tell you how much interest you will save and how many months early you will pay off the loan.

Maybe in another life I was a financial planner because when I hear people talk about debt and how they are going to get out of it I want to offer an excel spreadsheet budget as a solution.  It is a great feeling to know where your money is going every month.

Happy Friday!!!!