Re groceries: if we overspend I cut back in other areas. At the end of the year it has to be balanced, but I do spend more in some categories and less than others so all is good.

Anonymous wrote:I mean an actual budget, not just tracking?
When you have spent your allotment, do you actually stop spending?
How did you get so disciplined?

Also, when eating out on vacation, do you categorize that as vacation or eating out expenses?

Anyone not use an actual budget?

No budget. We do take a look where we are spending money. That's about it. We don't have different accounts for the sake of having different accounts. Every purchase is scrutinized at the time of purchase.

I sort of have a budget. I'm not sure if this is a budget or tracking but here's what I do.

When I get paid, my paycheck is split into 3 accounts. 1 - Long term savings, 2 - short term savings, and 3 - monthly expenses/spending $.

I'm only spending the money in account 3 regularly. I pay bills first, then buy almost everything using a credit card and pay it off every couple of weeks using the money in account 3. I sometimes spend more on the card than I have in the account, but that seldom happens. When I do, I cut back on things for a week or two to make up the difference. Examples - walking/metro instead of taxi, cooking instead of eating out, put off a hair cut until the next month, diy mani/pedi.

On vacation, I consider eating out as part of the vacation expense and I pull from my short term savings to pay for it.

Anonymous wrote:Not anymore. We've proven frugal and we're saving on target. We have a target savings of 4k a month. As long as we hit that we're happy. We track and try not to overspend.

What is your HHI?

270k HHI. No fixed budget, though we allocate to checking and savings based on expected monthly spending. Take from savings for anything unique/that exceeds.

We don't have a budget, but we track everything we spend by category. We have "goals" in mind every month of how much we want to be spending versus saving. Everything related to vacation (getting there, what we do there, etc.) is categorized as vacation. We are happy with our spending versus saving - if we were not, we would probably have an actual budget instead of just tracking. HHI ~ $200k.

Not anymore. We've proven frugal and we're saving on target. We have a target savings of 4k a month. As long as we hit that we're happy. We track and try not to overspend.

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.

We're like most of the others - we track and do not necessarily budget. If we found ourselves alarmed by what our tracking revealed and thought we were overspending then we would get stricter and develop an actual budget.

Eating out on vacation is part of the vacation category. We do not budget, we track. HHI ~$200k.

Anonymous wrote:Yes, we have a budget. HHI is 450.

What happens if you spent all the grocery allotment?

OP here. I dont have one either. Though it seems everyone else does.

Yes, we have a budget. HHI is 450.

Don't have a budget. I seriously thought only college students did this? HHI is 350k.

I mean an actual budget, not just tracking?
When you have spent your allotment, do you actually stop spending?
How did you get so disciplined?

Also, when eating out on vacation, do you categorize that as vacation or eating out expenses?

Anyone not use an actual budget?