How do you budget?

I am interested in reading about how other families budget but here is what we do:

I started out by writing out all of our household bills for the month.
Mortgage $580
cell phone $92 (I rounded this to $95 for budgeting purposes)
Cable/internet $100
Electric/water/sewer $95
(I rounded the electric up to $115 for budgeting purposes because that is more than what we pay almost every month but our highest ever bill was $125 and I wanted to make sure we had enough to cover a higher than average bill and the extra stays in savings anyway.)

Total monthly bills $890

Hubby gets paid weekly (as do I) so we took the $890 total and divided it by 4=$222.50. For a little added security, we put $230 a week in savings. On the months where there are 5 paychecks, we still but that $230 away for our car insurance (which we pay semi-annually). The extra that we put away each check plus the "bonus money" from the 5 payday months pays our car insurance for the year. I pull out of savings as needed to pay our bills.

Hubby's average check is $400 take home. Once we take out the $230 for bills, we have $170 each week for gas, groceries, doctor visit co-pays, entertainment, credit card payments, etc.
We do not budget these things as they vary. On average, DH spends $45/week on gas. We are pretty well stockpiled so my grocery expense is minimal. We don't generally eat out or go out so that is not really an expense and we have no credit card debt to speak of so that is not a factor either. Whatever hubby and I do not spend that week stays in his account, to be used on for weeks when we have more expenses than usual or gas has skyrocketed or whatever may happen. Once the money is gone though, it is gone. That is why we have "forgotten money".

Dh and I each have some $$ in our checkbooks that is unaccounted for. Should we write a check out not realizing that we have less than we thought, we have to take a sick kid to the dr, we have to pick up a prescription, whatever. We add to this forgotten money everytime we use our debit card or write a check. Say I buy some stuff at the grocery store and my total is $ 21.45. I will write that in my checkbook as $22. TA-DA! forgotten money. It adds up fast. It can be a real PITA for balancing your checkbook but I have found that I check online a couple times a week, check off the transactions that have cleared my bank and I always know my approximate balance including the forgotten money. I do not use the forgotten money as I go by my checkbook balance instead of my bank's balance but since I have started using my forgotten money system, it has become easier to balance my checkbook with my rounding. At one point, before we had kids, DH had $500 of forgotten money in his checkbook. He would round up to the nearest $5 instead of $1 as I do. Some people do not like this system but I find it very helpful. When I first started balancing DH's checkbook, I HATED it but as I started doing it, I found that I like the little bit of security it provides. On occasion (we are really short on cash, we had an unexpected bill, etc) I will add the forgotten money into my balance so I can cover that expense and then I start all over again.

Now on to my budget.

DH and I have seperate checking accounts. IDK why we still do it this way but we do and it works so we stick with it.
I work a varied schedule therefore my take-home pay varies weekly. I pay the sitter first out of my check and then the rest goes like this

gas $30
spending $10-$20
car payment:whatever is left

Usually I do not even spend $30 in gas so that money goes to my car payment. My spending money is for garage sales, oil changes for my car, clothes for me, whatever I want to spend it on.. My allowance.

I send whatever is left to my car because I do not owe a payment until March of 2009. I try to send at least $300 a month but I send whatever I can, even if it is only $25 that week. Right now I am working on paying off my credit card (again.. life insurance premium had to be charged), so I have not been sending anything to my car but sending everything to my card to get that paid off again and I can concentrate on my car once more.


This is the budget I set up when I started back to work and it varies somewhat at times but for the most part we are sticking to it really well. The household bills are the only thing that doesn't vary and gets paid the same every month. I hope to continue to save the money I was sending to my car once it is paid off. I would like to be able to put away $300 a month and have that money set aside for a big downpayment on a newer vehicle for DH or I when the time comes or to start making extra payments on our mortgage.

We also have an emergency fund in a seperate account. We put money in this account as we can. We have a pretty nice balance in it right now. This is for a new appliance (should one die), emergency home repairs, job loss, big medical bills, etc. We also pay our life insurance out of this fund yearly (usually but this year with hubby's layoff we didn't want to touch it so we paid the life insurance by credit card and have until the 8th to pay it off without any interest charges).

Now that my stockpile is well established. I can get away with spending $50 or less a week on groceries. We get WIC for now and that helps a lot. Once I start getting more hours at work we will no longer get WIC but I should still be able to get away with $50. I only buy what we need and what I want to stockpile that is almost free, really cheap, or completely free after sales and coupons. In the spring we are expanding our garden, so that will cut down some expense on produce as well. Sure, eventually I will have to spend more $ on groceries but for now getting away with $50 a week is awesome!! If I can keep up with the stockpiling now that we have minimal expense for food, I should be able to keep up below $75/week even when I use up more of my stockpile. I keep adding as I see fit and using up the oldest stuff first and I should be able to keep the expense down. Once we use up the meat we have frozen, that will become a bigger expense because the deals I used to get on meat (99 cents a lb for ground chuck, ground round and ground beef and pretty much everything else) aren't there anymore.