lulu2 - 01 January 2009 10:44 PM
mmmeg, thank you so much for the website !!! This is right up my alley - and it must be a good omen for me that you left it on Jan. 1 !!!! It is a great start.
I would like to ask, if you don’t mind, how you and your husband coordinated it all. That is the biggest obstacle for me. My husband is frugal and mindful - as am I - but we are not good at coordinating it. How did you guys approach it ?
Hi lulu2! I’m so glad you like the site! I know what you mean about “coordinating it”. It took my husband and I about 6 years to get our act together despite wanting to save money—though we plead being young and foolish back then ;)
Tracking and reviewing our account balances together weekly on a spreadsheet has really helped us. We fill in how much we owe to whom, how much we have in various accounts, and then also figure out how things are changing from week to week, from month to month, and since we started the spreadsheet. Even though we don’t keep track of all our individual purchases (as some people do), it’s really easy to tell how we’re doing. My husband and I actually look forward to “doing the numbers” since it’s nice to see the positive effects that our spending cuts have made.
Of course, it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t something that we did together. However, having a spreadsheet laid out like that makes it easy for us to communicate because it’s easier to know where we are and even where we want to go—and what’s reasonable. Just telling each other “we need to cut back” never worked for us.
Another thing we’ve started doing recently has been updating a new spreadsheet that has our regular month expenses on it such as insurance, our mortgage, average utility bills, etc. We update it as things change, so maybe once a month or so right now, and we keep archives of older versions for comparison.
It’s not a budget, per se. We actually don’t add in things like random purchases like clothes (though those things come out of an “allowance” we each get). This spreadsheet is more for things that we’re obligated to pay monthly. However, since starting it we’ve managed to reduce our obligations significantly. The really useful part of the spreadsheet is that we can play with the numbers and see how much we’d save monthly if cut back here or there. When you can play with several numbers at once, you can really see how saving small amounts in multiple places really adds up.
Anyhow, I hope that helps! I don’t know if something like our spreadsheets would work for you, but I do recommend giving it a try if you haven’t tried it before. And please, let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to know!
