Sticking to a Budget, How it Happened to Me - Part 2

So, after we got the logistics settled, we set out to pay off the credit card debt. This only took about two months because I've always hated paying interest and avoided having too much sitting on the card. The goal is to have *one* family credit card and to pay this credit card off IN FULL at the end of every month.

At the same time, I kept track of all our spending. I used a copy of the Template and just filled it in as we were going along in the month. I didn't pay so much attention to the Budgeted column because I hadn't quite figured out what our budget should be. I wanted to be able to identify where exactly all of our money was going and see where we could cut spending.

I broke my Excel spreadsheet up into several parts. The three main sections are: Summary (at the top), Income (paychecks, interest from checking), and Expenses. The expenses section is broken up further into Fixed (which would be your bills) and Variable (which would be the stuff that you have more control over, this is where the budget is usually blown to bits). And then the Variable Expenses is broken down further into Gasoline, Food, and Miscellaneous. I don't fool around with lots of categories like entertainment, medical, etc, because it just makes things more complex and messy.

Have I lost you yet?

Here's an outline of what I just said in case it makes more sense...

A. Summary

B. Income

C. Expenses

1. Fixed Expenses

2. Variable Expenses

a. Gasoline

b. Food

c. Miscellaneous

Am I still being confusing? I'm sorry. I'll explain each of the three main sections (Summary, Income, and Expenses) in later posts. But for now, the moral of this post is that we set up a plan to pay off our debt (but not the mortgage that we had at the time, cause, you know, what's the point?) and we kept track of our spending so we could later identify problem areas. Like how we figured out that Shane was we were wasting *way* too much money on grass seed, only to have a barren, sad, weed-infested lawn. I might have been buying a little too much yarn also, but that's not so important.