Family budgeting

I'm so lucky that have a wonderful "soon to be" husband that's very good with details and money budgeting.

September 2009 I switched jobs to only work part time, and in doing so I dropped my income about $1000 per month, that's a big drop. Well, I don't think my spending reflected my drop in income as well is it should have. I'm not even a big spender, but all those little things add up quickly. I have to often remind myself of the lifestyle I lived when I was a single mom, working three jobs and still not bringing in a lot of money, we always had free fun and my mortgage was always paid. If I did it then, I can certainly adopt some of those things again. Sometimes having a decent job spoils you.

So starting in Jan 2010 we've been planing our budgeting together as a family of four and looking into the future when we'll be married, I'll be home with more kids, and we'll be living on one income. So in order for that to become a reality, we've started tracking and budgeting our money to get us to that place.

Of course we're paying for our wedding and honeymoon on our own, so that's a big ticket item/items that we want to get paid for.

Last week my wonderful sweetie showed me the spreadsheet from January with details on my spending for the family (not including wedding items), and I felt a pain of uggggg, not guilt, just uggg. Wow, I didn't realize how much I was spending on things that I really didn't need. And let me remind you that he only showed me the misc items, not the budgeted amounts for food, housing, and other fixed bills. As we're doing fine in that regards.

So, I'm happy to say that we went over the final spreadsheet for Feb this evening, and I cut my expenses in half. Yeah!!!!! And it wasn't that hard. I think the month of March should even be less.

You don't need money to have fun, and even when you have the money to do so, the funnest things are still usually the free ones.