It might be a dirty word to you, or it might be one of your most favorite words. Maybe it's a word you don't think of too often. Maybe it's a word that you think "ohhh, yeah, I should do something about that," but then you don't.
Around the beginning of the year, I started keeping track of our spending in a spreadsheet. I wanted to see where our money was going, and on what. Plus, we were new homeowners and wanted to make sure that we had our money going to the right things. I am also a data nerd (I actually enjoyed the two graduate level statistics classes I took) so the idea of making a spreadsheet, filling in the data, and then analyzing it sounded fun. Turtle did not think so. He also did not enjoy the stats classes HE took. This is part of the reason why I do the budget :-)
I had been doing a great job keeping up my spreadsheet, filling it in, comparing numbers from month to month, showing Turtle how much we were saving and things like, "hey, look, the electric bill was $20 less than last month!"
Then I fell off of the wagon. As many of you know, we lost my grandfather at the beginning of October, after he was sick for a few weeks in September. I just opened my spreadsheet this morning and that's where I fell off. September's spaces are not complete. Ugh, I have some work to do to bring me up to date.
What I would like to do after I finish updating it is to provide whoever is out there, reading this, a bird's eye view of a homeowner's first year. As with anything new, there were a lot of surprises--both good and bad. Do I wish I'd known more before buying this house? YES. Would I change anything, really? NO. I don't think you can prepare yourself 100% for anything, so regardless of how much research we did, how much money we had saved, there would have been something else to throw us off.
Speaking of surprises, I'm home from work this morning because something is wrong with our furnace, and a guy is here working on it. You might remember the A/C post from this summer. And this one, too.
I think he's almost done, and I haven't updated my spreadsheets. Oops. There's always tonight, or tomorrow, or...
Rabbit- I wish I were like you in this...do you know of an easy, free perhaps web-based budget thingie (see- I don't even know the word)
ReplyDeleteJust getting to this now--hopefully you will see it! (Will ping your blog in case you don't)
ReplyDeleteRe: budget thingies--some people use Mint.com, some people use a money tracker that's available through the diet tracker Sparkpeople.com. I did try the Spark one, but didn't like it as much as I thought I would.
I just use boring old Excel. Then I can manipulate things the way I want them. I can make a google doc of a template and post that, if you'd like.