Break down your spending budget according to how frequently you are paid. When should you stuff your envelopes? I stuff mine when we get a paycheck, which is twice a month.So now ‘gifts’ and ‘car maintenance’ have envelopes of their own. Another realization was that I was depending on my emergency funds for car maintenance. There was no category for gifts which I realized was blowing a hole in my budget frequently.
In doing this I realized I hadn’t made changes to the household budget for about eight years! I shifted funds a bit between categories that had changed over the years. This may help you see your money a new way. Look over your current spending cash budget honestly and write a new one even if the changes you make aren’t that big.Setting up an Envelope Budget takes a little thought and organization. So it should be a piece of cake, right? Well, not exactly. My husband and I used a cash system as newlyweds. It’s not like I’d never done this before. This leads me back to the Envelope Budget. I love keeping different categories of money from touching each other, kind of like a kid who doesn’t want their peas and carrots to touch on the dinner plate. Don’t use the bill account for discretionary spending at all – just bills. It’s a suggestion that I highly recommend keep discretionary money and bills money in two separate banks accounts. I just wanted to investigate a little into my own habits with the debit card which had become nothing more than an unconscious swipe at the cash register.Īt our house we already have a healthy habit of keeping the regular bills in a separate account from spendable money so that there is zero problem with nibbling at the bills money for ‘wants’.
So separating the discretionary money in my budget into categories seemed like a reasonable diagnostic. I chose to make an Envelope Budget because my discretionary spending (groceries etc.) had gotten a bit out of hand and I always seemed to have too much month left at the end of my money. I’ll tell you what that is later in this article… Choosing to Create an Envelope System But I promised him something that made it easier for him to agree to try it. I should also tell you that my husband just kind of looked at me strangely when I said I wanted to do this and why. In the beginning it was both awkward, annoying and at times, funny. Unless you’ve tried this already you will be surprised by how many cashiers in this day and age are unfamiliar with the green stuff in your envelope as well as the places where cash simply doesn’t work.
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