Big Bad Boogey Budget - your advice would be great!

Do you have any tips on how to stick to the budget?
So, we have a budget. I track our expenditures DAILY (yep, annal, aren't l!!) but it is all no use, we still spend more than we budget for EVERY month.
We don't have a credit card but we seem to move a little backwards with our savings each month instead of forward.

Hi

My guess would be that you are not allocating enough money for all your expenses therefore running over budget.

We had $800 a month for food... in reality we are spending at least $1000 so I've tweaked ours to increase the amount for food and I was also underestimating petrol costs.

If you are tracking daily expenditure then you should be able to see where you are going over.

When we go on holidays I figure out how many days we are away, how much on food, spending, accommodation so a total per day, then we write down everything we spend and make sure its on or under that amount. A day or two you might go over and then you know you need to go a day or two under to get on track again. This worked really well for 2 long trips we did (8-10 weeks). I wish I could do same for when we are at home, we never went over budget on holiday.

Also make sure you have included or have on the radar ALL bills (rego, insurance, health insurance, petrol, gifts, clothing, maintenance/repairs). We do our budget a year in advance and know when all the bills will hit (going by past bills due date and amounts).

Even when you are vigilant its still so easy to go over... because life is V. expensive!

I think that is just it, life is V. expensive!! Thanks for your advice - l do probably have the budget on the minimum amounts when l should be more realistic. It just makes the savings amount look so pathetic, but l guess that would be better than nothing!!

We used only cash for a while - so stopped using EFTPOS and ATM. This meant we actually had to stick to our budget and it was easier to say I can't buy that because I didn't have the money in my wallet.

Now that we have stuck to that budget for a while we can use our bank cards to pay for things and know our limit (though we still prefer to use only cash).

We also do not have a credit card.

i'm a single mum so moneys always pretty tight here, what i do is write down everything i spend

get a book and write in it everytime u spend money and where u spend it
i found this really helpful in curbing my spending and i got to see where my money was going

Thanks for your post. I would be really interested to hear how you organised the whole cash budget. I tried it a few years back and had a little folder with all the different budget items listed and the $$ for each item in each thing. But when ever we went somewhere l obviously didnt take the folder and we either didn't have any cash on us or spent the 'wrong $'. Was l making it all too difficult? Also, doesn't it mean you always had money in your wallet?
I would love to hear how you make it work!!
Cheers

We put the cash in envelopes at home.
A separate envelope for each different category and then when we took money out we replaced it with the receipt (and change) when we came back.
We were also flexible though - if we got to a few days before the end of the month and needed say $20 for something we'd take it out of another envelope (noting that we'd transferred it).
So we made the envelopes work for us. Got to the end of the month and still tended to have money left over, which we carried over to the next month.
Does that make sense? I found it easy to explain until I wrote it out.

It does make sense - might have to be our new years resolution.

Thanks for your advice!

the envelope idea is what we use but before anything hits that we bpay money each week/fortnight onto phone and electricity. we then put money in envelopes for food and petrol and pay daycare straight up and transfer rent straight over to the real estate.

with savings i have a 'secret' account from dh and as soon as i get paid i transfer money into that account.

basically this is the way ours gets done.

1. pay into bank
2. pay rent, bpay phone and electricity.
3. transfer money over to savings - varies but i have a minimum amount i 'must' transfer.
4. withdraw remainder and pay daycare and put money aside for petrol and food and dh spendings and my spendings for entertainment.

We pay all our bills a bit each pay, and pay just over the minimum requirements each pay- mortgage, electricity, phone, car repayments, so we NEVER have any "bills"- everything is actually in credit (except for the mortgage of course!) I have a budget for groceries which gets deposited into my account, DH and I get a set amount "spending money" each, and a set amount goes into the "baby account" which pays for all DS clothes, nappies, and anything else he needs. The only thing that goes on the credit card is petrol. We put a small amount each pay into a holiday account, and anything left over goes into savings (used to rennovate our house!)
Paying the bills a little EVERY PAY is the BEST thing we have ever done.

I do the same thing littlek except we pay rent rather than a mortgage and we don't have a credit card. We also don't have 'spending money' as such.. DH gets $150 a week to cover lunch, smokes and petrol and dependin on how our groceries went for the week he sometimes asks if we have enough for beer, hehe.

Though we've come to an agreement that our budget is getting a major overhaul. ATM we're doing well paying for everything we need (and some wants) and we've been well out of debt for a few years BUT we don't have any savings. gasp

Hey mumalici0us -thanks for your input. l think you should be pretty proud of yourselves. Raising four kids with $0 debt is awesome.

I am currently reading a book called "real money advice of families" by Analaura & Wilson Luna. It has some good advice so far - l'll let you know if l discover the key to financial freedom!! ha ha