Weddingbee boards

In my head, haha. :P I know perfectly well how much I make, what percentage goes to taxes/etc., and what my expenses are. I keep a mental checklist of spending, which I check against online banking to make sure everything is where it should be.

How I figure it out is this way: I take my first paycheck of the month, subtract all the month's expenses, and whatever is left over is fun money (or money to be used for emergency stuff). The second paycheck is for savings/goals, like the wedding, honeymoon, new car/apartment, etc.

My fiance uses Mint to track different spending categories, but I prefer to just subtract all spending from what I know I can afford as spending money.

We use mint.com to track our budget.  Its super easy to use and I like that our transactions from various banks, credit cards, etc all show up in one place.

We budget monthly.  As far as pay cycles - he's paid every other Friday and I'm paid twice a month.  

Combining finances was a little weird since we're in our 30s and we've never had to consider anyone else in our financial decisions.  So it was important to me that we agreed to a budget and a savings strategy.

When you sign up for mint, it pulls in your last 60 or 90 days of transactions from your financial institutions and sort of makes a budget for you based on your past spending.  This was a great starting point because things like our mortgage, utilities, and cell phones are similar amounts each month.  We tweaked out budget for items that fluctuate like dining out and groceries.  

Once we had a good idea of what was coming in and what was going out, we figured out what our financial goals were (short term and long term) and we started calculating monthly savings for each goal and transferring money accordingly.  Mint has a goals feature and you can see progress each month which is fun!

Mint tracks all of this, which makes it to see where our money has gone and how we're doing versus our budget and goals.  And since we can both access the mint website, it makes it easier for us both to be involved.

I keep up with the finances on a day to day basis (paying bills, etc), but DH and I sit down at least monthly to go over income and expenses for that month - what we did well, what we did not do so well, etc.  

I love this sort of thing so PM me if you have any questions.

Our budget is not a spreadsheet. It is a mantra. Spend as little as possible. Have at least $100 extra at the end of the month. Rinse and repeat.

We keep an extremely detailed budget in a spreadsheet (we use Google Docs so we both have access to it wherever we are). We track on a monthly basis and each month create a new spreadsheet that also carries over unspent money from previous months. Next to each bill we keep track of info such as when the bill is due and how it is getting paid (auto-debit, check, online payment, etc). We have "allocated" and "spent" columns for each expense. When the money has been spent, it's entered into the spent column and summed up. For expenses such as our spending money and groceries, we try to reconcile it (basically, balance the checkbook) about once a week. With this system both of us know exactly what has been spent and what is still available. It also helps me not spend as much because I like seeing my unspent spending money add up!  We looked into Mint.com but found that making our own spreadsheets wasn't that hard and it's much more tailored to what we actually want to do with our money.

Our categories:

Savings:

• "True savings" saving for emergencies, things we don't budget for
• "Buying big stuff" - for travel, for downpayment on house, for other big purchases

Debt:

• Student loan payments
• Credit card

Fixed Expenses:

• Rent, gas, electric, internet, car insurance, rental insurance, water/sewer, phone bill
• For these, we budget exact amounts for those that never change and average amounts for those that do change. Some of these are bimonthly and we budget half the amount of the total bill for each month. We always leave a little bit of unbudgeted money for overage on any of these bills

Variable Expenses:

• Entertainment: dinners out, movies, concerts, etc
• Groceries and drug store purchases
• My spending money
• His spending money

I guess we don't have a strict budget. FH gets paid weekly, so I have on my Google calendar which bills need to be paid on which week. So, for instance, one week, we pay the mortgage, power, and phone bill. The next week, car payments, insurance, cable. Each week there's a roughly equal amount of money being spent on bills. Once the bills are paid, a portion of what's left over goes in savings, a portion goes toward the wedding (I try to set aside or pay toward the wedding the same amount each week) and the rest is "free" money. But we don't keep track of eating out, groceries, entertainment, gas, things like that- that all just falls into "free" money. The only thing I really keep track of are mortgage and bills/utilities and once those are paid, I don't find we really need to set limits on what we spend on the rest of our expenses.