Money Diary

When I was cleaning out the front room on Sunday I ran across my Money Ledger I used when I first got out of college, had moved back in with my parents after living in an apartment for a year and was trying to make my way down "to the big city" I wasnted to get serious about budgeting and saving money in hopes that I could start being more responsible.


I printed out all the pages- single sided because at the time I didn't have the patience to set up my document to print so i could saddle stitch it. then i double stick taped them to each other (i had a lot of time on my hands when i lived with my parents. with a 45 minute bus commute into the city each way, your social life becomes non-existent, so you find ways to entertain yourself) and duct taped the outside. love this thing. i will probably never have the heart to throw it away.





each month i would figure out my constants. then i would look to see how much i had left and i would move money around where i needed it. at the end of the month, i woudl tally up my total and look at the overall picture. once i moved out, i was able to write out my grocery lists (and you can see my "entertainment" section picked up a bit) and at one point i tried to keep track of prices at the grocery. i gave up on that.




though this method is EXTREMELY hard to keep up with when you have two people in the household, i still recommend you try something similar. In doing this, I was able to not only buy myself my pretty Mac laptop, but I was able to save enough money to pay cash for a down payment on our now house. And now, we're on the same path to buying our next house.



We still use a similar method to keep track of expenses- and this way could definitely work if you had one common ledger and each person recorded their purchases at the end of the day. In our house, the ledger would get buried in a day, so we rely on my excel sheets (well, I rely on the spreadsheets. I just tell the hubz how much he can spend this month). This was so helpful in seeing where my money was going, if I was happy with where I was spending my money and when I was spending too much in a month. Visualization.


If budgeting overwhelms you, start small. start by writing out your total monthly income. then, separate your bills out by when they are due- first half and second half. this is important. separate them out into: due 1-15 and 16-30/31 (change the dates if your pay schedule is different). by doing this, you are making sure you have enough money in BOTH halves of the month to pay bills. try this for a month and keep track (as best you can- i log onto our online banking at least 3 times a week to track both my purchases and my hubz and fill in if I happen to miss a purchase) of what you- yourself- spend. After I had done this for a few months, I saw ways we could cut some costs (changing some payments to direct debit to avoid processing fees, lowering our cell phone plan and removing the internet from my phone-which was used for work at the time, but was no longer needed and a few others that I'm sure were minor, but still kept some money in my pocket).




**If you're interested in my excel sheet, send me an email or convo me on Etsy and I can send over a copy. It changes monthly as the bills change, but it's extremely helpful for us to see what needs to be paid, how much is being saved and where our money needs to work for us that month.