July Income and Expenses Report
It’s already August, so it’s time for another income and expenses report. I love going back through the month to see how we did. At the end I’ll explain a little more about my lax method of budgeting and income and expenses.
INCOME
This is usually our best month of the year, and it looks like it is again this year. I have to give my husband credit for all the work he does. You have to be good in business and performing to be a professional juggler.
Our income this month was $11,933.28. Since we are self employed most of that money was made in the month of June, but we weren’t paid until July.
EXPENSES
Here are our expenses:
| First Mortgage | $1,712.00 | Kids | $50.00 | |||
| Taxes | $500.00 | Matt | $50.00 | |||
| Electricity | $112.00 | Jaime | $50.00 | |||
| Gas/Heat | Childcare | $880.00 | ||||
| Phone/Internet | $30.00 | |||||
| Attic Project | $852.00 | |||||
| Cell | $88.00 | Laptop | $703.00 | |||
| Car Insurance | $76.00 | Printer ink | $46.02 | |||
| Grocery | $500.00 | Hosting | $77.93 | |||
| Restaurants | $100.00 | |||||
| Health Insurance | $485.00 | |||||
| Gas and Oil | $350.00 | Total | $6,661.95 |
My lax method of budgeting looks like this. At the beginning of each month we estimate what we’ll spend. It’s usually the same, so we just brainstorm if there will be any extra expenses. There is always something, like birthday parties, or needing ink for the printer. Either I look it up to get a general cost estimate, or I just know from experience.
The Fridge Sheet
Then I print out a Fridge Sheet. I call it that because I am old school and have it on my fridge! It’s pretty much just an excel doc with columns for each category. I write in what the budget is at the top of the column. So for Gas I write $350 and we just minus each receipt as we take receipts from our wallet. Sometimes it’s every few days, sometimes it doesn’t happen for two weeks, but all of the information gets on there before the end of the month.
For Groceries, I don’t write $500 at the top. I write $125 per week. I learned my lesson with that. I would tend to take a little more each week sometimes spending $130, or $140, so the last week we would have like $60! That wasn’t fun. So now try to hit $125 each time. Sometimes I’m off, but I make it up for it the next week.
At the end of the month all I do is make sure the categories under. I don’t care exactly how much under they are. I don’t move money out of the account if I saved $40 that month. I just let it pad the checking account. I do this because we go over occasionally. We don’t go over with our personal funds, or birthday’s etc, but sometimes we need to get more gas than we expected. I’m not as strict now that I am getting out of debt. If it goes over, we still have a pad from the months we were under. But I make sure to adjust for the next month.
That is why the expenses above are all round numbers. I could go back to the Fridge Sheet and tally everything for each category and record it. The info is there, and we save it in case I need to look back at it next year. But in general I don’t want my finances to take up a ton of time.
We need to be in control of our finances, but we don’t want them to control us either.
How lax is your budgeting? Or how strict is it?
Tags: Budgeting, Debt Free, debt freedom, expenses, finances, income, Personal Finance
Categories: All, Budgeting, Business, Debt, Debt Freedom, Finance, Finances, Goals
Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.
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19 responses
I’m smiling as thats exactly what I used to do with my grocery budget, be left with about £20 for the last week of the month; great month Jamie 🙂
Woo! I’m glad I’m not the only one. 🙂 Thanks Laura!
I recently read something that referred to budgets as run by dictators or historians. Dictators have complete control and historians just record what happened. My husband and I got into a general habit of not spending too much, so I am a budget historian.
Once or twice a month I type in every single expense into the correct category on my Excel budget sheet and see how well or “bad” we did. If we did go over too much in one area, we’ll tone back the following month.
The only strict thing we do is to hit all our savings goals no matter what. Our budget is actually from the 13th of one month to the 12th of the next and we pay our subacconts on the 15th before anything else happens. We may not have much left over at the end of the month, but at least we know we covered our bills and savings goals for sure. 🙂
If we do have anything left, we put 50% towards savings/mortgage debt, 25% to our vacation account, and split the other 25% between our fun money accounts.
I’d never heard of that before! That’s a great definition too. And it’s easy to say it’s ‘bad’ but of course it’s all course correction!
Wow, you manage your expenses well, I don’t have that kind of discipline. (I know what you’re going to say lol).
Anyway, those taxes are crazy!
hahaa. 😉 I’m just a minimalists now. It’s habit.
Those aren’t property taxes, those are estimated federal taxes. Last year they were over $1,000 a month but having another baby and a bigger house helps. Property taxes are like $300 a month. (our last house they were almost $500 a month though!)
ah OK…that makes sense. Was going to say that for $500/mo in taxes you should be living in Bel Air!
Hi Jamie – Tell us more about how you make $11,000 self-employed! I think that would be fascinating insight for readers and myself!
Thnx, Sam
I’ll make sure to add that to my list of things to write about. A lot of that income was Matt’s. My husband has shown me that you can do amazing things when you are self employed. I never thought a professional juggler could ever make enough money. Yet My husband and his brother make together $140,000 a year doing it. They laugh in the face of adversity. 😉 I’m just a regular ol’ business coach. They inspire me!
Oh wow, $1470,000 a year juggling is great! Did you say before you retired from your FT job that your income was like 70%+ of your total income?
IF so, would that put you at like making $120,000 or more if he was making $70,000? And if so, can you write about how you got the courage to walk away from all that money?
Cheers,
At the time that I quit he was making like $35,000-$40,000 gross. I was making $100,000. (I was 22 when I got that job and thought I could walk on water!) Yeah it was tough to walk away from that much money. But I thought if I could make it once at such a young age I could make it again. Plus they loved me and said I could always come back.
🙂
Ah, gotcha. Were you in finance? $100,000 at 22 is a lot of money!
Nope- I have a degree in IT and was an engineer for a video on demand company. I went from $40k (as a network operations technician) to $100k. Amazing the way things happen.
I have to say this article really resonated with me! My husband and I have a similar budget set up only we keep them in a binder in a sleeve for that month. We go out for a meal and have an “empire meeting” and we review next month’s budget, our savings goals, and anything else that may need to be addressed. We pretty much have a standard budget and then add things for the month coming up such as car oil changes and textbook purchases. At the end of the month we print off our spending report from Microsoft Money and compare it to our budget. We don’t stress about small overages because most of the time we r under in other areas and often meet or exceed our savings goal. I do often wish we had a more firm way of saving instead of just saving what we don’t spend, but we save no less then 25% of our net income. We often shoot for 40% or better. Each year we come up with a rough yearly budget, but yearly goals in writing, and establish what we think we can save given our living situation for that year (we move almost yearly thanks to Uncle Sam). Next year we will need to come up with a plan to finish off our emergency fund and debt repayment for student loans. Thanks for sharing!
Nice! Saving 25% is awesome, but I love that you shoot for 40% or better. Plus I love the thought of going out to eat to do the budget, that sounds so much more fun that sitting at our bar looking at the numbers like we did this month. Good luck with your goals!
I love your fridge sheet idea. Seems to work similar to an envelope system. My wife and I work on our budget monthly and for the most part it works great. We usually go over on our grocery budget each week though, which we might just need to increase it a little bit. We have discussed using an enevlope system to assist with not going over budget in our separate categories, but your fridge sheet might just do the trick. Thanks for the suggestion.
Thanks John! Since money is so digital, all we need to do is look at numbers on a screen instead of carrying the cash. I understand the point of the envelope system, but this works much better to me! Glad you think it’s cool too 🙂
Good going Jaime, I was wondering if you could design the secret of your success or majority of your income is coming from?
I’m a business coach and work part time and my husband is a performing artist. 🙂 Does that answer the question?