BALANCING THE BDUGET

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We have finally finished our budget.

This budget has been in the works for over three years, and has been put off more times than a shower at a Phish concert. But finally, after much effort, the Gibbons Family Budget is in place.

My wife and I have been talking about this budget for a long time. The budget idea first came to light back when we were engaged. We had all of these big plans for living on a tight budget and making sensible purchases and socking away set amounts for retirement each month. But something would always get in the way, such as a beer special or an emergency trip to Oktoberfest, and the budget would go out the window.

But over the past few months, we have decided that we are really and truly and seriously and for real and no kidding going to do a budget this time.

Getting the budget back on track is actually a natural evolution of our economic strategy. When we first got married, I handled all of the bills, the checkbook, and the accounts. In short, I was the Chief Financial Officer of our little two person company. Well, I guess I kinda got sidetracked, and didn’t actually balance the checkbook for a couple of years, and that somewhat annoyed my wife. She demoted me to Assistant Bookkeeping Clerk, and took over the task of balancing the checkbook. (For the record, the reason I never balanced the checkbook is because I kept such detailed records of our accounts, it would be unnecessary to double check my work. Balancing against a bank statement would only potentially point out their errors, thus undermining their confidence as a financial institution. I have too much respect for my bank to do that.)

I decided that I would help my moving all of our records from the notebook that I had been using for several years to a computer program we have. I tried to use the program a while back, but when you don’t actually balance the checkbook, it doesn’t really matter much. So I started anew, and entered all of our information in the system, so that my wife could have complete and total records at her disposal each month when it came time to balance the checkbook.

Well, after about five months of wading through things, my wife finally got our account balanced. She says that most of the mistakes were errors of carelessness on my part. I think that is hogwash, and that the bank made those errors. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Anyway, once the account was balanced, we started playing around with the program. It has all of these fancy-dancy reports that you ca generate to show you where you’re spending your money, and how often you pay for this or that. With a tool like at our fingertips, we could make a budget in no time at all!

Well, turns out you can make a budget, but to make one that actually makes sense take slightly more than no time. We easily got a printout of our standard monthly expenses: mortgage, phone bill, shots for pet monkey, etc. Those things are the same each month (assuming Tobo doesn’t bite any more neighbors), so we knew what we were going to have pay out there.

The tricky part came when we started trying to figure out how much per month we spent on groceries. Sure, we could total up all of the checks that we had written to grocery stores, but there were two problems with this: (1) sometimes we go to the –Mart stores, which not only have groceries, but every other conceivable product on this planet (“We have a special on live Sherpas on aisle six…”), so it’s tough to break out what is food and what is for your K-2 expedition and (2) we go to the grocery store about as often as most people go to work (except for people who work in grocery stores; that skews the statistics). Looking back through the checks, we found that we often would go the store several times in a single day. And, if you’re like me, you can’t just pick up a single item. You may run up for milk, but you’re coming home with a trunk-load of chicken breasts because, hey, they were on sale!

So the main thing we had to do in order to bring the budget to its final resting state was to allot a grocery amount for each week. And each Sunday we will plan out the week’s menu, and go to the grocery store then. No more impulse buying several times a week. If we find out we need something, we wait until Sunday, and hope it falls within our set budget amount. If it doesn’t, Tobo may not get his rice cakes for the week.

So we’re only a short ways into the era of the budget, and we seem to be doing fine. It seems the grocery spending was the main thing that sent the budget spiraling out of control. And we seem to have it in check, and from what I can tell, no one in the house is starving. Not even the Sherpas.