Tag Archives: budget

Creating a Spending Budget To Spend More Money

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The significant percentage of people have problems with spend more money than they have, so they usually overspend.

To counter their overspending habit, the more prudent ones typically implement some sort of budget.  I’ve never implemented such a budget, but my situation is a bit different that other!

My problem is I underspend!

So while most folks go to the store to go shopping and bring home bags full of items bought, I often come home empty-handed.  Oh I’ll spend 1/2 to a full hour looking at the item I want to buy, but often in the end, I leave telling myself I’ll wait for it to go on sale, or that I’ll get the next newer model when it comes out.  I’ve been doing this process for years with the flat HD TVs.

Some people would say: “Oh, you’re just cheap”, but those people don’t see what I spend on my kids.  I’m much quicker to loosen the purse strings when the kids come into question versus anything else.

How Does My Wife Handle My Underspending?

Surprisingly very well, but then again, she is even more frugal than I am.  So I’ll suggest something that we need and she’ll mildly question it, and I’ll then gladly, quickly backpedal, saving me the bucks!

While this is a positive for a financial perspective, it also leads to a less than optimized lifestyle that I’m trying to fix.  I’ve been encouraging my wife go out during the day when the kids are at school to meet with friends for lunch once a week.  She seems to enjoy this little (new) tradition.

Now that I have enough money generated from my Free Lunch Experiment, I might go out to lunch with people or friends, once a week too!

So that all said, with both my wife and I going out once a week for lunch, surely I must be spending more, but not so fast!  You see, my wife has a small (around 8 hours total) weekly job, where she uses the money to spend on herself and the kids, so this doesn’t cost me.  And the Free Lunch Experiment provides me money from the dividends so I don’t have to pay for those 1 or 2 lunches that I eat out once a week!

So I’m really not paying from my income either of the weekly lunch out sessions.

A Budget For Spending:

This is where a Budget for Spending would be ideal!  The idea would be to determine that amount of money we want to spend on entertainment at the beginning of the year, and make a spending budget to make sure that money get spend on those goals.  Of course, the money can come from any source (income, investments, dividends, money found, etc).

Thinking about it, I can imagine the following Budget Goals (Kids activities, vacations, entertainment, house projects, Gifts, etc).

Is there any readers out there that have “Nospenditis” like I do?

-MR

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Financial Lesson For My Son – Savings

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A few months ago, around my son’s birthday, I tried to teach my son a financial lesson about savings.  Unfortunately, it was foiled by birthday money that he received.

For the past few years, my son was spending a lot of his allowance money on pokemon cards.  A few times he got disappointed because he wouldn’t have enough money to buy other things like Nintendo DS games, Legos and the like…  Of course, I would explain to him why he should save his money, but when we would talk about the interest gaining aspects, he never quite grasped the idea or at least he didn’t  until a few weeks ago.

You see, my son has converted from an impulsive spender to a thoughtful saver!  While I’m not entirely sure what brought out this change other than the example that my wife and I set, I’m impressed!

So yesterday, I decided to try to explained the financial lesson on savings again.  I pointed out how the interest gains can work with his saving dollars.  He understood the idea of interest this time around, especially the geometric (also called exponential) growth aspect.  When it’s my daughter’s time to learn this lesson, I think I’ll create a “what if analysis” spreadsheet as a fun interactive visual to the lesson!

My Son The Budget User?

My son created a type of budget journal!  It actually more like a checkbook balancing kind of journal, but he created it by without any help from adults!

The most important thing is showing encouragement for both this new activity, “Savings“, and the newly created system that my son created to help accomplish his new savings habit!

I created excel process to help me with my finances all the time.  Do you use spreadsheets or other such document to give you a leg up on finances or other decision-making processes?

-MR

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