What’s your process for staying on track with a budget throughout the month? For me it always seems like there are unexpected things that come up. Then before the end of month I see we accidentally burned through the whole budget for x 😱

Caveat that this advise is specifically for families struggling to stay within a budget. My suggestion to families is to budget BEFORE you spend. So you are at the grocery store, you see you have 500$ left in your grocery budget, and then after you pay for it you open your budegeting app and mark the expense as budgeting. If you budget once a month, you aren’t actually budgeting, you are just retroactively categorizing. A proper budget informs your decision making process. For example, in the grocery store if you want to pay 600$ but only have 500$ in the grocery budget, its right then that you should drag 100$ from the seforim budget to the grocery budget to pay for it. Without doing that you aren’t actually having your budget inform your decision.

so you are saying you need to consult your budget before you buy anything and shuffle allocations as needed? It sounds nice in an ideal world, but I have a hard time seeing that happen in real life. also requires serious team work

again, this advise is for people that really need to get on top of their budgets. THat means yes it is serious work and serious team work but it is essential

This is the system me and my wife started a few months ago. The image below is a sample of a spreadsheet I made (with some made up numbers plugged in). The general idea is that we have $X of income and $Y of set expenses, which leaves $Z of variable expenses each month. Variable expenses are nearly always spent on credit cards, so really its just a matter of figuring out how much we can charge on our credit cards each month. At the beginning of the month we sit down and figure out what we need to purchase that month. If the kids need new shoes we add that as a line item with a budget amount for that. If Yom Tov is that month we might have a higher grocery budget (or lower if we are going to one of our parents). Then throughout the month (generally once a week on Motzei Shabbos or Sunday) I update the amounts spent in each line item (based on the credit card reports) and we sit down for 5-10 minutes and see where we are holding. In the below chart, the left side is mostly just to calculate how much we can spend on our credit cards. The green is income, The red is set monthly bills and the goldish is money that we put away each month (either for the long term or larger purchases). In the second column I calculate how much we actually have available to spend and remove some expenses that have set costs, but are charged through the credit card (the red area). We also keep track of the surplus from each month so that we know how much we can go above what we have available for the month. Its basically a way to track progress from previous months and use the extras in future months. (The yellow area at the bottom is a list of items we want to buy. Its just a reminder of things we want to put on the budget at some point so we can get them in months we don't have many expenses) The section on the right is the actual budget. Some items are on there every month like gas and groceries although the amounts vary from month to month. It tracks how much was actually spent and how much is left. The blue sections on the bottom track how much of the overall budget was used for the month as well as how much of the month has passed. It makes it easy to see if we are spending the money too quickly (if the month is 20% done but we spent 60% its something to pay attention to). The bottom is just a reminder of what months quarterly costs come up (trash and water for us) as well as birthday months so we remember to budget for them)

@curved-toothbrush-84425 will you consider a blog post on frum.finance?

I’m loving this thread. This is actually what I was planning on asking about in the group. Are there different methods and cadences, like doing a retro and planning for one’s budget and where the spending is up to? 1 hour weekly sit down to go over? Twice a week?

not a pro here, but a simple method we came up with that works for us. • make an excel sheet with a total income column - all the money that is coming in. • then an essential expenses column which is bills, mortgage, insurance etc that is fixed amounts that you know are automatically going out of your account. • then see what is left when you deduct that from your income. after that, i allocate “spending” say 100$ for cleaning help, 200$ for clothes, 700$ food etc. so the typical things you need to spend on but that are not fixed amounts like bills - but you set what you want to spend on. it helps to set in things like $100 for amazon if you find you always need random things from there but at beginning of month you don’t know what it would be. in our relationship my husband does the savings/investments/maaser and i do the spending, so the amount we calculate for spending we send it to a seperate account which i have the card for. and the spending on the month i do on there. anything that is not factored in at begining cant be spent on unless we discuss it together and sometimes it has to be only bought the next month/not at all/we eat more simply etc. 2 other things - 1. have a special accessible separate fund for emergencies like car breakdown. we have this in account we can transfer out of into spending account, but no card to spend directly from. 2. if you/wife/child likes to have spending money and doesnt want their ice coffee/manicure whatever all factored in and pre-determined, we do a $50/100 etc spending for me factored in that i can do whatever i want with without having to start cheshboning if its in the budget and justifying it. i often take it out in cash and thats mine to do what i want without the guilt like its eating into other areas we need it.

Love this thread Feels like it should be the top thread in budgeting

this is great. If anybody is open to it, I'd love to see some sample budgets, posted anonymously... I feel like we spend way too much much I have no idea where we can cut further

i do not live in the US and only have one child, but my method is the main thing i am sharing here. before creating a budget, to be able to get estimates for eg how much money we spend on food, i went through the previous banks statements and calculated total spent on food, so then i can forecast a ballpark figure for how much we want to spend on food. many banks have transactions downloadable as an excel sheet so its easy to work with.

@curved-toothbrush-84425 Do you plan the "Future Purchases" based on the monthly surplus, or do they get added in somewhere else? (Also, why is auto insurance in Monthly Savings instead of Monthly Bills?)

Future purchases are just "larger" purchases that we want to do at some point, generally more vanity items, but sometimes necessary ones like a new bed for a child thats getting old enough for one. The idea is for it to be motivational when we have months where we can insert it into that months budget we can move over items that we don't need but want and cross them off that list. Its a way of showing that we can buy anything we want, we just need to fit it into the budget. Auto insurance is a "savings" because we pay 6 months at a time. They usually charge a small fee (for Geico $5) for each transaction you make to them. So if you pay monthly you spend $60/yr in those fees. I pay it biannually which saves $50/yr. But because its a known and somewhat larger expense I just put money away each month and then use it to pay the bill every 6 months. It helps soften the blow. Its similar to saving up for a car, sheitel, events, etc. Just a smaller amount and a shorter time scale .

Funny, my insurance is farkert - I get a lower rate for paying monthly, I assume because they would rather have my money sooner.

Paying monthly would get them the money later. I essentially pay for 6 months in advance. I doubt you pay less for monthly than for 6 months. I think they usually make the first payment higher, and then the next 5 are lower. So it might seem lower halfway through, but is actually higher (or the same)

🤷 I was quoted 3 rates, one for monthly payments, one for quarterly, and one for annually, and the monthly was the cheapest.

Did they hide an "installment fee" somewhere? That sounds impossibly dumb on the insurance company's part. Why would anyone pay more upfront rather than less over time?

Yeh it seems unlikely, although I got a phone and if i paid it up front it would have been nearly double the price. Couldn't understand the reason for that 🤷‍♂️

Yeh it seems unlikely, although I got a phone and if i paid it up front it would have been nearly double the price. Couldn't understand the reason for that 🤷‍♂️

Was it to keep you on their phone plan? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Dunno. I could pay it off early without paying the higher amount. Maybe its like cars now and there are incentives for getting people on financing that they want to get.