Did You Increase Your Budget For This Year
August 31, 2009 – 6:28 amDid you increase your budget this year, and if so by how much and for what reason? My wife and I just completed our new budget, and we’re planning to spend approximately the same amount this year as we did last year. Lately this has always been the goal for us, but we’re not going to set an unrealistic budget either.
We did however make numerous bucket swaps this year due to major changes that are on the horizon, including:
- our two new baby girls are on the way, so we made the following adjustments:
- I increased our utility costs, mostly electricity and gas, to reflect my wife staying at home all day
- I decreased our gasoline budget, because she won’t be commuting 40 minutes each way to work going forward
- we don’t spend much on professional clothing for work, so I didn’t adjust this amount at all.
- I adjusted the baby fund (for clothing, toys, and mostly essentials) based on everything we’ve already purchased.
- I didn’t adjust our medical insurance premiums yet but I need to, because I’ll have 2 more people to insure once the babies arrive and our plan is expensive this year because we opted for the “enhanced” medical plan due to the delivery
- I upped the amount we put in our flexible spending account
- I added in a small college fund (which I don’t plan to tell my kids about. That’s for another post though)
- I changed our tax withholdings due to the new kiddos, which freed up some income that otherwise would have gone to taxes
- I lowered our vacation fund by 1/2 to cover some of our expense increases, because we won’t be taking as many trips this year (i.e. zero to one rather than 2)
- I increased our food budget, because we overspent it by quite a bit last year. I’m still not sure why this is the case, but I want to have a budget that is realistic not “best case”. This also gives me the opportunity to try and remedy the problem and end up with extra money available for other purposes if I succeed.
- I adjusted our home and car insurance amounts based on the new premiums, and removed funds from a couple of small buckets that no longer apply (magazine subscriptions).
- I moved our “book” money into our separate fun money accounts, so we could use those funds separately as we see fit.
- I decreased our “dining out” funds a little bit, because we’ve been eating at home more often (for health reasons for me mostly). This may also be why our grocery spending was a bit high this year.
Did you make any major adjustments to your budget this year, or is there anything major I missed with kids on the way that you would have included?
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