The “Year of Family” Budget

Our goal is to spend $3500 or less every month.

Included in this spending are the following fixed costs:

$2550 (our mortgage, utilities, insurance and general bills such as internet, Netflix, cell phone, etc.)

$200 (savings that go towards the G-man’s retirement fund OR our “rainy day” needs)

That leaves $750 for the rest of our expenses, such as food, household needs, transportation, etc.

A couple of budgeting points:

Ways to keep fixed costs low:
We acutally didn’t need to change any of our fixed costs for our “Year of Family” because we already keep them pretty low.  We don’t have cable, or data plans on our cell phones.  We considered getting rid of our Netflix account, but it only costs us about $12 a month, and we are willing to pay that to get our DVDs (we don’t get streaming).  However, that could be on the chopping block when we see how things are going.

Importance of savings:
Even though we are living on a tight budget, we think it is important to keep saving.  That $200 a month is non-negotiable savings that gets automatically deducted from our checking to our savings every month.  It is important to have a safety net.  That money will sit in our savings account until we either need it for some major issue (like a household problem or vet bill) or until we have reached the end of our “Year of Family” and we can put it away to the G-man’s retirement.