Thursday, January 3, 2008

Financial Shape in 2008 Challenge: The Budget

Here it is folks, as inspired by the Money Saving Mom.

$702.83 The mortgage
$93.00 Phone/Internet/TV
$8.00 Car registration
$213.26 Minimum student loan payments
$70.00 Preschool
$243.00 Utilities (a $50 decrease from last year, despite a 5% increase in gas cost)
$93.00 Auto insurance
$18.01 Netflix
$57.00 Water
$75.00 Christmas (no firm decision on this yet)
$9.00 Lawn care
$20.00 Taxes
$25.00 General savings
$473-ish Debt snowball (clearly, always less as there is some unexpected expense every single month)

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$505.00 Food
$170.00 Gas
$40.00 Books and clothes
$25 Fun
$60.00 Gifts

Everything above the line is managed within our checking account, including a separate register that includes all of those savings categories. Everything below the line is on a cash system.

4 comments:

zdoodlebub said...

I just printed this to show my husband.

Tread Softly said...

Looks good. It's always nice to have the checks written and ready :)

Trudi said...

Did you do anything special to get your utility bills down? I'm currently scratching my head trying to figure out how to lower ours, way too high!

Anonymous said...

Hi Trudi! I answered your question as a new blog post! :)
http://glutenfreefrugal.blogspot.com/2008/04/lowering-utilities-bill-revisited.html

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