the Angie’s List Blue House Blog

I’ve always been good at math. And, contrary to popular belief that journalism is a refuge for the mathematically challenged, I’ve actually always liked learning everything from the basics of decimals to the more complicated formulas of calculus derivatives.
My husband? Not so much.
So in our home, I’m the controller of the checkbook. Before my husband and I got married a few months ago, we had already decided that I’d record all expenses and that we’d both make joint decisions about purchases. The thing is, we never really narrowed down how much we’d actually be willing to spend, or what we’d agree to buy, or how often we’d dip into our wallets.
So then the idea we often talked about but never got around to seriously developing — the word everyone dreads but everyone knows they need to survive in this world — it became a reality for us a little more than a month ago.
A BUDGET. That’s right. We’re finally on a budget.
I can’t say it’s been smooth sailing just yet. Fortunately, we’re using a Microsoft Excel sheet to keep track of our monthly expenses in a variety of categories, including rent, renter’s insurance, utilities, cable and Internet, gas, groceries and tithes. And I’m proud to say that we’re scraping up the extra money we have every month to go toward savings for retirement (God knows we’ll need that!), emergencies and even vacations. But we’ve hit a few bumps along the way, which have only shown us that we can never really plan a month’s worth of spending exactly.
Take, for instance, the weekend we had to spend about $200 on my husband’s black suit for a church choir program. Or the time my husband decided to buy a backup hard drive after getting repeated error messages on his computer for the past year. Or the time we had to shell out a few hundred dollars to get my husband’s front car bumper fixed and get my own car’s worn serpentine belt replaced. Hey, that’s no chump change for us.
But while shuffling between being “dead in the red” and then “back in the black,” we’ve felt the self-actualizing victories of successfully pinching every penny to stay within budget, or having a triumphant week where we actually didn’t go over our food/entertainment budget (thank you Jimmy John’s!)
At least now we know where our money is going and how much more we’ll need to save to meet our larger goals for a house/family in the next few years. Who knows, maybe we’ll even start our own business? (My husband can cook some pretty good Chicken Francese!) As our finances continue to get more complex, maybe a financial planner on Angie’s List could actually help us, too. The good thing about my current math work is I don’t have to worry about taking a test in 60 minutes. I just have to make sure we don’t go bankrupt.