At the end of each year, my husband and I review the prior year and make plans for the upcoming year. We do this separately at first and then together. Finances are one of the areas that we cover.
The way we do the finances in our house is that I do each month’s budget and my husband makes sure that we actually stick to it. What can I say? I’m the “idea” person. He’s the “implementation” one! So far, it’s been working pretty well for us. We have “wiggle room” in our budget (for unexpected purchases) but this year, we’re trying to cut down on unnecessary extra expenses. (We’re hoping to adopt in the near future and adoption is EXPENSIVE!) Anyway, I “track” the extras each month and what I found is that we spend the most (outside of the budget) money on the following:
-Food (primarily me – Starbucks, Ollie’s Chinese Food, etc.)
-Gifts (primarily me – if I could, I’d give a gift to practically everybody for every occasion!)
-Postage (primarily me with shipping giveaway items)
And
-School related purchases (my husband – teachers have to pay for a lot of things out of their own pockets!)
Obviously, I’m the bigger budget buster! So, below are our 2009 strategies:
-Food: We (okay, I!) are cutting back on eating out. I’m also taking a break from Starbucks for the year. I’ll only get my caramel frapp if my husband (or someone else!) buys it for me.
-Gifts: I’m not going to stop giving them. I just won’t give as many. (It’s my nature to just give random gifts if I see something that I think a particular person would like. Now, I’ll save the gifts for special occasions.)
-Postage: I’m going to have more of my sponsors ship prizes directly to the winners. For the items that I ship, they will go out through regular (not priority) mail.
And
-School related purchases: That’s part of my husband’s job, so “it is what it is”.
The one other thing that we discussed is that we need to choose a new credit card. We each have our own credit card that we pay the balance off each month. Our card companies aren’t making any money off us, but we’re not getting anything from them either -no money-back or incentive program type things. (Parenting has a good article about choosing a smarter credit card here.
That’s about it for us. Savings, investments, paying down good debt (i.e. college) and such are all pretty much on track.