Budget Strategerie

Whether or not it was a word, I kind of like the term strategerie coined and still fodder for jokes from President Bush 43. I want to get serious about my various budget categories and have all sorts of  ideas of what to implement. The biggie though is a better tracking system of where our money goes and then finding ways to bring the spend down and plug holes. I've created a couple connected spread sheets. Here is my spread sheet for the Priority spending, the $30,000 target savings above month the month expenses. I'm already feeling budgetarily behind because the hotel costs are more than I anticipated and we will need one more night for Nashville than I originally planned for, unless we drive straight through.

		Month	College	Show choir Trips	Grad Party	Move in Weekend	Parents Weekend	Choir Concerts	Home Improvement	Total
College-savings credit	$21,000	Jan								0
Show Choir Trips	$1,970	Feb								0
Graduation Party	$900	Mar								0
Move in Weekend	$175	Apr								0
Parents Weekend	$175	May								0
Choir Concerts	$350	Jun								0
Home Improvement	$4,530	Jul								0
Total	$29,100	Aug								0
		Sep								0
		Oct								0
		Nov								0
		Dec								0
		Total	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Here is my spread sheet for discretionary, with line items for fixed expenses, and the priority s lumped into a single line item. DH picked up a few things earlier in the week, so this already has a couple expenses filled in. I am trying to hit annual targets, which hopefully then will let me feel more flexible when I come across a good deal to stock up, but also show when I need to give myself  challenges like to eat from the pantry, or self imposed austerity measures. I left $300 in the budget for both DH and DD2 for clothing. I don't know what either will actually need and I don't want to push my self imposed clothing ban on them. I also put eating out as its own category from both  travel costs and entertainment, but I see the three of those might be interchangeable, or borrowable from each other. 

The charitable giving is a little less on the cash flow budget as we have a certain percent of giving coming out of our checks right away that we don't see as take home. I target to our local  family service. I realized when I looked this over for questions that it looks like we give only about 1.25% of our budget in that way. I will say this next year's budget will be leaner than other years in what we donate so I know we could do better, but it really is more like 4%. 

Discretionary Budget categories	Budget	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total	Plus/minus budget
Household and Groceries	5000	34.71												34.71	4965.29
Eating Out	1500													0	1500
Entertainment	900													0	900
Car Gas	2400													0	2400
Car and house gen maintenance	600													0	600
School/activity  expenses	300	4.29												4.29	295.71
church/charitable giving	2000													0	2000
Clothing	660													0	660
Misc. gifts/birthdays	600													0	600
Christmas	1800													0	1800
Total	15760													0	15760
Set expenses-allowance	26200													0	26200
Sh Happens/T&I	7800													0	7800
Priority Savings goals-detail work sheet	30000													0	30000
Side Savings	500													0	500
Target Take home	80260													0	80260
Actuals	0	39	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	39	-39

Both are super tiny print in order to fit them on as examples but I have these in Excel. and easy enough to plug in the daily spending. A I did a bunch of after Christmas shopping for future gifts and put those on the credit card, which will be payable at months end. I'll be entering those in the respective categories since they are for this year and the cash flow comes out for this year. I don't want to lose sight of what was already spent, but intended for a future use. I can then also leave myself comments or notes along the way. 

I think this might work for me. I have to follow strict spending guidelines and monitoring at work. I owe it to myself and my family t do the same with the household budget. After all, I am the CEO of Chez Myers.