Who’s ready to tackle getting your finances in order in 2016?!? Like I have mentioned recently, we are working on getting some major aspects of our lives in order this year and one of those is knowing where our money is going and keeping track of it all. But I really would have liked to just win the crazy huge Power Ball and just relaxed on the whole “budget” thing. I guess that really no matter how much or how little you make, one should know where their hard earned money is going.
So…enter the Finance Binder!
Naming it the “Finance Binder” seemed better than the “Budget Binder.” Budget seems a bit too restrictive, doesn’t it? My mother-in-law reminded me that when my 5 year old was about 3, he would say “You’re such a budget,” as a derogatory name when he was mad!! Guess he had heard us talking too much about budgets around here back then in a negative way!! Oops!
So as we are tackling this first “system” in 2016, I’m going to refer to it as a Finance Binder going forward. It seems more positive and motivating and less restrictive :)
This whole system is pretty simple. In the past, I’ve had a tendency to make things a bit more complicated and detailed when coming up with organizational ideas and it tends to be really good in theory, and yet too much work for me to keep up on a daily basis. I’m learning that simpler is better for me. This binder is nothing fancy, just a Staples 1″ Binder in blue. It comes in different sizes and a ton of different colors, but really any binder would do. You could also use a notebook and make your own tabs or dividers. I made it its own binder cover because I also have a tendency to follow through more when things are cute ;)
Let’s take a look inside!
First up is a list of our Recurring Expenses List for the year. It has spots under Yearly, Bi-Yearly, Quarterly, Bi-Monthly and Monthly to track our expenses throughout the year, the amount, date the bill is due and a spot for each month to check off when that bill has been paid. I used to pay all our bills but Jason took over that task a few years ago, {Thank goodness! I hate that grown up job!}. However, I still pay a few of the bills that are not set up for online banking and so this little check list will help me know if we’ve paid them all or if there was something missing. Of course some of the bills will be different month to month, but we can just fill that amount in in the little monthly check box. I think this will help when we go to make an actual budget for our monthly income. I printed it on cardstock since it will hopefully last the year and I put it in a plastic page protector since it will only come out once a month.
I used monthly dividers {January – December} to make it easy to track each month. In each section, I’ve got a Monthly Check In {link for this at the end of the post}, a Monthly Calendar so we can list pay days and bills and visually see what’s due when, a Withdrawl Form to track what cash we are taking out, and Monthly Expense Tracking Forms for our different spending categories. You could also add a spot to keep Charitable Donations if that worked for you. We have a separate file folder where we put receipts that we need to keep to track our charitable donations, but this binder would be a good spot for that. I also think including a debt tracker form would be a good idea to be able to see at a glance any outstanding debt.
A list of our categories:
- Household
- Groceries
- Out to Eat
- Kids
- Perosnal Care {hair cuts, doctor visit co-pays, etc.}
- Clothing
- Auto/Gas
- Gifts
- Entertainment
- Misc.
These are categories that make sense for us. I didn’t include our own extra little spending money. Way back when we first got married, we had very different approaches to saving and spending money. It was the thing we fought about all the time. We each had a debit card to our joint account and would use it throughout the day/week without the other knowing. Not on purpose, we just weren’t communicating. And money was being debited on the same days. Sometimes money we didn’t end up having because we were both spending it without knowing what the other was purchasing!!! Things I thought were really important to me, he didn’t understand and vice versa. So enter The Compromise of 2004. We came up with the idea that in addition to our joint checking and savings, we would get our own accounts and each get the same small percentage of our earnings to spend as “fun money.” We knew we would never be earning the exact same amount at any given time and it didn’t make sense to get a percentage of what we were individually making. By each getting the same amount, we were on a level playing field and didn’t have to get any kind of approval on how we spent that money. It seriously saved our marriage. Thankfully over the years, we have developed very similar ideas on how we should spend and save money. To this day, we still use this method. Some years the percentage is a bit more, some its a bit less. And it annoys me because after always thinking I was the responsible one with my money, I always have way less in my account than Jason does!!!! Totally, totally annoying!!!
Could I just do this with an online finance manager? Definitely. I have Quicken right on my laptop. I started using it a few months ago and for some reason it’s harder for me to open up that little icon and fill things out. I wasn’t entering our receipts often enough, and I had an overflowing pile of receipts just sitting there, staring at me. I’m really more of a paper and pen kind of girl. And I’m hoping that since this is already cateogrized, but simple enough to follow, I can keep it up. For the last two weeks, whenever I have a few free minutes, I have been entering the receipts on the appropriate tracker and it’s going pretty good so far!
We’ve been putting our receipts in this little gray tray on my desk.
More on that CEO calendar later this month!
We have realized we can’t really set up a “budget” until we have few months of tracking our spending. So we will do this for a few months and if we decide to make an actual budget, we will have the info we need. This may be enough though to curb our spending and to know where our money is going.
This is a system that we desperately needed to put in place, but it’s a new system. And sometimes things need to be tweaked. We’ll see how this goes for a couple months and reevaluate. I’m sharing this on here to keep me accountable to actually follow through and to possibly spark ideas for you in case you’re in the same boat and need some direction in this area of life, too. I LOVE learning how other people do life. I love hearing what works for them and strategies that they have tried and that have stuck around, making life easier, more manageble and more fun, so maybe this will give you some ideas that would work for you.
I made the super cute, creative, colorful black and white printables {HA! Hopefully you can hear the sarcasm :)} but you can find other budget printables, including the actually cute, creative and colorful Monthly Check In form I included in our binder on Just a Girl and Her Blog. You can read more about our Goals for 2016 here and the systems and organization here that I hope to get set up this month for the year ahead!
Here’s to an organized financially successful 2016!
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