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[quote=Anonymous]Yes. HHI 230k. A budget is just you telling your money what to do. If we have unexpected expenses come up, then we fully have the power to revise the budget mid month. A big line item on ours is savings, so it is easy to reduce that if we were to have something come up. But if we didn't make a budget (a plan), I know we wouldn't have made as much progress on our financial goals. My experience is if you don't tell your money what to do, it kind of trickles away and you dont realize it until the CC bill comes in and you go "Holy crap, we spent WHAT on eating out?!"

How'd we get good at it? Took Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University when I was, indeed, a poor college student living on 16k a year in Chicago. I'm not a Ramsey die hard, I'm an atheist that uses credit cards. The concepts scale though and a budget is life changing.

Everyone has a budget, the question is if you do it on purpose ahead of time or if you just kind of stumble through and think "We have to spend what we have to spend."

For the day to day, we use You Need a Budget to both create the budget at the beginning of the month and then track through the month how we are doing against it. Did it for many years on a simple spreadsheet but with two people on the go, putting transactions into YNAB is so much easier.

The first few months it can be tricky to figure out how much you need to allocate to each category, but once you have done it awhole, overspending the grocery budget really doesn't come up very often unless we throw an unplanned party or something  (rare, usually we know at the beginning of the month if we need to plan for extra spending like that).

It really doesn't matter how you categorize things, it just matters that you do it, even if it isn't exactly categorized right. We have a Misc category. For eating out on vacation, we would probably put that in vacation, personally but it doesn't matter as long as you planned that spending into a category before you actually spent it.

Dave Ramsey's lessons on budgeting are great even if you hate everything else he teaches. You can find them free online on his site, he has recordings of his radio show free online by category so you could listen to the budgeting ones, or get his book. No need to pay to read it.

It is mostly about the mindset, not the mechanics.[/quote]

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