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I’m doing a series of videos to highlight tips for each section of my home management planner. Today is the 4th section – Budget Planning. Ready to plan your bills, create a budget, and payoff some debt? You’re in the right place!
Watch my tour here, then please let me know if you have any questions in the comments below.
If you don’t have your planner yet, get your pages ASAP!
Shop HM Planners
And please, comment if you have any questions. Blog comments are always the easiest way to know you’ll get an answer 100% of the time.
From my home to yours,
Mary
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Thank you Mary! This is very practical and helpful and I am going to try it!
I think you’d love the HM Planner!
Hi Mary! After skipping last year, I downloaded and printed out your planner again this year. I’ve been following your blog and Facebook pages for several years now, though my house doesn’t always look like it, hahah, and I bought the downloadable planner about 2-3 years ago. I’m really excited to make some good progress this year using both the planner and the declutter packet. I’m already a little behind on that one, lol, but it’s okay, I’m just getting over having been sick for a couple weeks and will be able to get back to decluttering soon.
I’m here today because I have a question for you regarding the spending tracker portion of the planner. While we pay things like mortgage, power, vehicle payments, cell phones, etc., automatically every month directly from our checking account, other expenses, like groceries and gas, usually go on the credit card, which we pay off in full every month.
It’s the kind of credit card where you get points for every dollar spent, and that includes all of my husband’s work travel expenses, so in the end, we average about $150 back per month.
The bill gets paid on the 14th of every month. In my Excel spreadsheet that basically serves as our checkbook, I include the actual payment we make so it reflects our checking account balance. However, when I work through trying to budget and figure out how and where we’re spending our money, it gets a little more complicated.
When I purchase something by credit card between January 1st and 16th, for example, it actually goes to the February 14th bill. Purchases made from January 17th to the end of January (and through mid-February) go to the March 14th bill.
If I include an item we purchased using cash, check, or debit card on the January spending tracker of the planner, no problem, it comes directly from our money in January. But I feel like I should be moving ahead to the February and March pages to record things that we buy in January using the credit card. At the same time, that doesn’t feel like it accurately reflects the spending habits of that particular month. But if I include them on the month when they were purchased, the totals don’t add up to what the credit card payment actually was (since my January payment included purchases made from mid-November through mid-December).
I know I’m totally overthinking this, lol, but I was interested in what your take on it is, and how you would handle it.
So, there is a difference between budgeting and cash flow. It sounds to me like you’re describing cash flow. I think it would simplify your budget to think about what you’re spending in that specific month. My budget doesn’t look at the whole picture of all our money, because Matt and I divide the household budgets. I get a set amount of “budget” to pay for groceries, school needs, kid activities, birthdays, holidays, clothes, etc. He budgets our fuel, lawn stuff, medical, etc. You get to decide the boundaries of your budget. 🙂 Good luck!