Our Second Budget meeting

For some reason our first budget meeting was quicker than the last. We started Saturday morning at 10:30am then I went to work and left Shane continuing the budget. When I got back at around 4:30 he was still there and we finished up the budget together at 5:30. It took us 7 hours, but now that we made up rules about our budget and figured out some confusing details, this will save us some time next month.
 In our picture we are at the business office of our apartment complex using its free wi-fi internet.

What also made our budget take forever was calculating how much money was leftover from the month of September which is the first month we started our envelope system and Dave Ramsey's Zero Balance budget. Don't let the "Zero" scare you. The "Zero" doesn't mean that the budget is like one of those diets where you just have to starve yourself till you're crippled. It doesn't mean that you don't have to buy milk because water is good enough. NO! The "Zero" means that at the end of the budget you know exactly where all your money is supposed to go. "Every dollar has a name." as Dave Ramsey suggests. The point is to have a spot for each dollar so they don't get lost in the "black hole of spending". (See the link at the end of the post to get the budget sheet).

I am pleased to report our left over amount was about $220.00 dollars. Our budget is organized in 3 columns over three pages, so while we were punching in the numbers into the calculator from the different pages it seemed to give us a different answer every time making us re-calculate over and over again. It was pretty frustrating because it was all on human error. But now we have an excel spreadsheet that we will begin using next month which will calculate the math for us. In the picture the book in front of me is our Dave Ramsey work book that has the budget worksheets we use to make our budget. The book between Shane and I is a calender book my sister-in-law Debbie gave me for free. We use that calender to keep track of the bills that come in. Every single bill we get in the mail we immediately record it in the book in red. On the correct date that it's due we write in the name of the company and how much is due.With a blue or black ink pen we write notes or our account numbers and passwords we have for each company like Sprint, Electricity, etc. As we pay our bills we use a highlighter to highlight the ones payed so that we keep track of what has been payed and what has not. This calendar book has also helped keep a record of how much our bills average out to so that we can keep track of anyone ripping us off and calculate our 3-6 month emergency savings. The orange box is a file book where we file all off our receipts by month.

Since we payed off our debt last month we now get to put the $300.00 dollars that were assigned to the debt columns in September toward our baby step #3 which is making a 3-6 month emergency fund in case we were to be out of work. But wait..... since we decided to take a trip to D.C. in April we re-directed some of the $300.00 dollars to save up money for that, and we also had to use some of that money for our other envelopes. In the end we are putting $200.00 dollars away for Baby Step 3.

Click here to get the Zero Balance Budget spreadsheet