Budgeting basics from my girl Gail

It is very likely that I'm the only person who will find this fascinating, but I've got some neat budgeting links for today. Hubby and I are making the effort to track our expenses carefully to determine some budgeting basics. Since the summer of 2009, we've been keeping our variable expense-related receipts in envelopes (one per month), and from time to time, I'll tally up the totals by category. Being a big fan of Til Debt Do Us Part, I used the same categories that Gail Vaz-Oxlade does:

-Food/Personal Care
-Transportation (gas, car maintenance and repair, parking)
-Clothing/Gifts
-Entertainment
-Hobbies (which she includes under entertainment, but I prefer to track separately)
-Other (home maintenance, photos, postage, stationary, everything else; interestingly, most of our "Other" receipts came from Walmart or Home Depot)

and I added:
-Baby (gear, furniture, mostly one-time expenses; any gifts, clothes, food or personal care items would go into those categories)

On the show, when she's teaching a couple how to budget, they will have sent her three months' worth of receipts for their variable expenses (as well as their total income and fixed expenses), and from those amounts, she works out how much they require for each category per week. Then she puts that amount in cash into jars labelled by category, and the couple has to get to the end of the week before they get to the end of the money. They generally get their variable expenses cut, too, in order to teach them not to live from paycheque to paycheque, and to help them chip away at their debt (usually student loans, car loans, or consumer debt, not mortgages).

Fortunately, Hubby and I are debt-free aside from our mortgage, but we're using the interactive budget worksheet Gail offers on her website. Our finances are pretty tight, and we want to make sure we're not overspending anywhere without realizing it. If you're in a similar situation, I highly recommend watching the past episodes of her show (which has finished its 8-season run now, and even has some follow-ups with a few couples). Not only will it probably make you feel a bit better about yourself, but you'll likely pick up some great tips on keeping your spending in check.

And now, it's naptime. Budget talk puts D to sleep.