Budgeting Fun

As I had previously mentioned, one of our goals for this year is to become better budgeters. I have never been very good at budgeting or saving money (those two seem to go hand in hand). Mylo is the opposite - he can save like nobody's business and will go months without spending money on personal items.

That was all fine and good until we got married (almost 5 years ago). Now our financial dichotomy needs to be resolved. We need to be on the same page. Finances aren't something we have ever really fought about, but we both felt like we needed to be more of a team to meet our long term financial goals and build up our savings.

So we decided to start budgeting FOR REAL. We purchased YNAB budgeting software, which is super easy to use and has tons of tutorials to teach you how to budget. We love, love, love it. Part of the YNAB philosophy is that you assign every dollar a job - whether it be groceries, savings, clothing, etc.

We sat down together and created our budget, deciding where we want allocate our money. It has been an eye opener as to how much money we were wasting in areas of spending that we don't really care about or don't get need to spend as much in. Now that we have our initial budget set up, we sit down on a weekly basis to input all our spending for that week, allocating it to each of our budget categories.

We did pretty well for January and stuck to our budget in most areas, except groceries. We always go way over budget with groceries. It is a work in progress. It has been great for us to communicate and talk more about our finances and doing the budget together creates more accountability for both of us. Plus we actually saved money! Woot Woot!

I am actually starting to love budgeting. I guess "budgeting" doesn't have to be bad word after all.