Joint Budget

Written by HERS on May 29, 2008 – 1:33 am -

Everyone in the personal finance blogosphere has a budget or has written about budgeting many times so I’m sure this isn’t a new concept to anyone reading this. For us here at HisHersMoney this is the first time we are working on a joint budget.

This is really just our first cut at things and I’m sure there are many places we could really trim the fat. A few things I would like to point out:

  1. We have given ourselves $100 a week as our own money. Each can do whatever they would like with their money no questions asked. But when it’s gone, it’s gone. If there’s something we want and it costs over $100 then it will require a little saving.
    • For instance, in July I (Hers) plan on going to the beach for a long weekend with some girlfriends. The costs will include the shared hotel room, gas, food and entertainment. I will need to continue to save up over the next month to cover my trip expenses.
  2. There’s no credit card usage. (Nothing else to really say here)
  3. Not counting the cars we have roughly $15k in debt. I’ll do an exact calculation and payment plan in a few days. We currently have $1100 a month budgeted to go towards this. I expect that we should be able to pay more each month by cutting back in some other areas but I know that at least this minimum amount is budgeted.
  4. Both cars are scheduled to be paid off within a year and a half so we are most likely going to let that debt and payments ride it’s course. The interest rates are decent on them and we have absolutely no intentions of buying any new vehicles at this point.
  5. Her monthly income shown is after a $1200/month 401k contribution
  6. This should easily increase our net worth by about $55,000 over the next year. Good yes, but not great, not exceptional, not on track to being where I would like to be……

So, the basics are shown below. We welcome and feedback, questions or comments you might have as we work to refine out budget. I will be doing a follow up post on the savings part which we did some updates on as a result of a recent financial advisor visit (yes I found a new advisor)as well as a post regarding an updated debt summary which we really need to look at ourselves.

Budget.jpg

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Posted in Debt, Hers |

2 Comments to “Joint Budget”

  1. Tim Ramsey Says:
    May 29th, 2008 at 1:37 am

    I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.

    Tim Ramsey

  2. Rachel @ Master Your Card Says:
    May 29th, 2008 at 10:35 am

    By joint budget I thought you meant that you would share the money i.e. instead of having $100 each have $200 between you. I think this could be effective as it would mean that any spend that one person makes is depriving their partner of something - it could make you think much harder before spending and may mean that less money is spent.

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