Join our participants as they reduce debt and increase savings with the help of Summit financial coaches.
Mary and Josh's Journey:
How to plan for the future…one bill at a time
When Josh and I first tried to budget, we did a few things “wrong” right off the bat. First, we didn’t use the rolling budget that I’ve talked about several times. This was wrong for us because, for example, once we would go over our grocery budget, we would throw in the towel and declare budgeting was not for us…that we just couldn’t figure out how to effectively live on a budget. The second thing we did wrong was to not account for every cent going out of our budget throughout the year. Our budget would include all the big categories that we would use each month (i.e., mortgage, groceries, gas, etc.), but it would not include things such as our water bill (sent quarterly), our annual Amazon Prime subscription or our license plate renewals. I couldn’t figure out how to account for these before using the rolling budget (as you have probably begun to see, I am a very Type A individual. I need things laid out clearly for me to grasp them). As a result, we have found that for us to stay on top of these quarterly/annual payments, we need to put some of our take-home money each month and put them towards these categories in our budget. For example, each month we have $67 going towards our water bill, $10 towards Amazon Prime, and $14.45 going towards our license plate renewals. Because of this, when we get the bill, we have enough in our checking to cover the fees and we don’t need to worry about which budget we will need to pull the money from to cover it.
Because of this opportunity with Project Money, we won’t be living paycheck to paycheck anymore. Before Project Money, we really didn’t have a plan for every cent coming in each month because we were aggressively paying off our debt while managing several kids in daycare. If you are in this situation of needing to account for each cent so you don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck, we strongly encourage you to consider a rolling budget (Excel is your best friend for this!) and don’t forget to account for the bills that come up a few times per year!