Monday, November 21, 2011

Budgets

Thomas and I have never had a budget. Once, when we were trying to decide how much to spend on a house, we listed all our expenses (very roughly) to determine how much would be left over for a house payment slash free spending, but we never used it to actually control how much we spent on anything other than the house. There are two reasons we’ve never felt the need for a budget: we’re both cheapskates and, probably because of that, we earn more than we spend. Over time, our savings account has grown of its own accord, for no reason other than we just don’t spend it.
Still, I’m SURE we could be saving more if we actually came up with a budget. I know we spend more than we need to on groceries – especially if I do the grocery shopping, which I’m not allowed to do very often, because I buy the entire store. We need to cancel our cable (haven’t gotten around to it) and I honestly don’t want to know what we spend on gas (although there’s really no way to reduce that, because we don’t do much, if any, extraneous driving).

Do you have a budget?  Is it strict?

5 comments:

  1. Gah--we don't. We kind of mentally and savings-wise wing it.

    Suze Orman would probably want to beat me.

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  2. We don't really have a budget. It's more or less a checklist of bills with an estimate of the amount. Beyond that it's a free for all. Too much for my liking honestly but I haven't really figured out how to control it because we always have something come up that we were expecting and therefore couldn't budget for.

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  3. My husband keeps one, and tells me if we're spending too much, but I'm of the "if I know it's there, I spend it" variety so I prefer not to know.

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  4. We are really bad if we don't have a strict budget. So I try to keep us on a strict budget. (Doesn't always work.)

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  5. No, but we do say "We should make a budget" every couple of months.

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