We’ve been trying a “cash budgeting” system for a few months now, and it’s going pretty well.\u00a0 That is, it covers our variable expenses.\u00a0 I still use a bank account dedicated to relatively fixed expenses such as rent, utilities, membership dues, and minimum credit card payments.\u00a0 Most of those are paid automatically, pulled directly from the account.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, there are two places where the system falls short.\u00a0 This isn’t so much because of any flaw in the idea of cash budgeting, but due to our limited funds.<\/p>\n
The first is that we don’t have anything left over to pay down the debt besides the aforementioned minimums.\u00a0 I’ll be relying on my annual bonus to hack away at that fecking demon.<\/p>\n
The second is “unexpected” expenses.\u00a0 We didn’t fully account for birthdays or other special occasions and gifts.\u00a0 “Gifts” for us mostly means for the kids (and the increasingly frequent parties they attend), since we don’t usually give them otherwise.\u00a0 School lunches we could roll into groceries, so that’s not so bad.<\/p>\n
However, there are those big ones that hit you now and again.\u00a0 Although we do have a “Car” envelope (cash allotted for each expense goes into an olde-fashioned paper envelope), it builds over time.\u00a0 Over the past week, my front driver-side tire has been angrily grinding under 20MPH.\u00a0 I finally took the day off today to get it into the shop.\u00a0 It’s the brakes. And the rusted calipers.\u00a0 And over $600.<\/p>\n
We ain’t got that much in the envelope.<\/p>\n
So, it’ll probably go on the credit card we just managed to pay off, with last year’s bonus, and I’ll try to pay it off again with the two “bonus paychecks” a year direct-deposited into the dedicated bill-paying account.<\/p>\n