My Bare Bones Budget
My take-home pay each month is $2,409.97. Knowing that I have not been living within my means, I decided to make a “Bare Bones Budget”. What always screws me up when keeping a budget is budgeting per expense, instead of grouping things together. Each month when I pay my rent, I have to pay mandatory fees and my water bill together with it. So that always varies between $1032-37. I could choose a number within that range, but why not add my other utilities in? And if I’m adding necessary utilities, why don’t I add in the unnecessary ones like cell phone and internet?
So I’ve broken my budget into a few categories:
Category 1: Rent/Utilities/Phone/Internet/Food — $1345
Category 2: Savings — $250
Category 3: Loans — $262.72
Category 4: Gas/Tolls/Car Insurance/Car Maintenance — $480
Category 5: Entertainment/Gifts/Clothing/Donations/Miscellaneous — $70
The only problem with a bare bones budget is that it doesn’t leave room for surprises (unless you count Category 5’s “miscellaneous” option. Already this month I paid my county car tax for $64.39…technically, that could go in either Category 4 or 5…or 2, “Savings”. With my $250/month, I want to put $200 into the savings for paying my car loan, $25 into an “Emergency Fund” which I don’t really have yet, and another $25 into a Gift Fund. It seems like every month, I have another gift to buy, and sometimes more than one. In July, I have two weddings and my grandmother’s birthday. I want to start putting money aside specifically for that.
To do that, I’m going to start splitting up my bank accounts. I have two checking accounts, two savings accounts, and one Money Market account. The Money Market has the most money in it and is the savings for paying off my car. My most often used checking account will stay the same pretty much; it’ll be used for Categories 1, 3, and 4. One savings account will be the Emergency fund, one will be the Gift fund, and the lesser used checking account will just hold whatever money is leftover at the end.
If this is too hard, I may I have to fiddle with the numbers as I go. For example, $250 is more than 10% of my take home income, and I already have 3% of my salary before taxes going into a 401K (with 50% match), so it might be best to put more into travel as this summer approaches and gas gets higher.
In other news, this weekend my boyfriend went grocery shopping for Saturday night’s dinner so that he could cook for me. I told him that I didn’t want him to buy food so that I could stick to the pantry diet, but apparently he disapproves and didn’t want to stick to it himself. So he bought me a package of lunch meat and bread for this week’s lunch while he was there. I’m so used to not having that kind of food that I cooked lunch and came to work before remembering. That’s the best part of this diet-that’s-not-really-a-diet: I’m finally learning how quick cooking can really be. This gives me hope that in the future, when I’m a parent, my children won’t starve to death.
