Journeyer’s Chronicles

The Engineer was paid on the 15th, so on the weekend we sat down and reviewed our budget to see how we had fared.

Overall, we did well. We made it through the month without a credit card. Woo Hoo! This is the first time in years that we have not relied on our cards in some way or another during the month. It is such a relief to see the credit card balance going down, rather than creeping back up by each pay day.

There are a few areas where we still need to focus our attention so that we can do an even better job next month.

• We need to increase our fuel budget by around $30/month. Increasing fuel prices are biting. We had thought that with The Engineer working locally a few days a week our fuel costs would decrease, but unfortunately, they’ve gone up slightly.
• We went over our book budget. A while ago we signed up for a membership at Audible, as we were buying quite a few audiobooks for listening to on our iPods. We’ve got almost a little library of unlistened to titles now, so I’m going to cancel our membership which costs $25/month.
• The expenses of setting up Journeyer’s Chronicles put us over budget in the computer category. This was mostly domain name costs (be warned, shopping for domain names can be addictive!) and so we won’t incur the cost again for two years.
• Doctors bills were higher than expected during the month (winter lurgies). At the moment this category is looking very sad and RED, but I will get the paperwork together to claim our refunds at Medicare later this week and it will only be slightly over budget. We might need to consider increasing the allocation to doctors’ bills a little in the colder months.
• The biggest shock was the scheduled service for my husband’s car costing $150 more than usual - aaargh! We have been getting the services for this car done at the dealer as they offered an extended new car warranty if we had them done there. After discussing this with my father, who is a mechanic, we’ve decided that the extra money we’re spending on services negates the advantages of the extended warranty. In future we’re getting the cars serviced at a local mechanic who does handbook services (so the original warranty remains).
• We’ve started putting amounts away each month for periodic bills (like car registration and school fees), birthday gifts and so on. However we had two birthdays, childcare fees and dancing lesson fees due in our first month of squirrelling away. That means that these categories will be in the red until our monthly contributions build them back up.

While we haven’t relied on credit to fund any of these, we have had to “rob Peter to pay Paul”. That is, we’ve had to find the money somewhere so it’s come out of other categories in our budget. That means we have less to spend in those categories. Fortunately, we are able to have quite a few discretionary spending categories (like entertainment, dining out and vacation), so the “make up” amounts will come out of those.

Our challenge for next month is to come in on or under budget in all categories.

Do you have a budget? What challenges have you had in sticking to it? Perhaps you have some great tips for staying on track? Let us know in the comments area below.

Technorati Tags: budgeting, spending