MoneyStuffed

One important first step in taking control of your financial life is knowing where your money goes. 

Below is where our money goes each month. 

- Local Phone Service (only additional option is Caller ID):  Monthly - $21.83.

- Long Distance Phone Service: Monthly - approx. $5 to $15.

- Cell Phone w/ Unlimited Blackberry Service (reimbursed by work):  Monthly -  $100

- Gas/Electric (varies widely):  Monthly - $170 to $370.

- Water/Sewer:  Quarterly - $65.

- Cable/High Speed Internet (internet reimbursed by work at $55.95; cable with HBO/Cinemax):  Monthly - $190.

- Car Insurance (5 cars - don’t ask):  Bi-yearly - $1200

- Mortgage (payment):  Monthly - $2,148.33

- Mortgage (extra principal):  Monthly - $251.67

- Fuel for Cars:  Monthly - $150

- Hubby’s 401k:  14% of salary.  Company contributes 9%.  Total - 23%

- My 401k:  16% of salary.  Company contributes 3%.  Total - 19%

- Food:  Monthly - $100 to $400 (varies widely)

If push came to shove, I could shave money off of the expenses above.

- Drop the extra principal payment on our mortgage (save $251.67 a month) 

- Drop the Land Line Telephone Service. (saving $26 to $36 a month)

- Drop Cable TV. (We would need internet access for a while to find a job, but I could cut back to another provider’s introductory rate for less money.  If all else fails, leaching off of the neighbor’s unsecured wireless network is an option.)

- 401k.  (Obviously, if we have no jobs, we wouldn’t be contributing to any 401ks.)

- Lose some cars for Car Insurance.  (We have 5 cars right now, 4 are my husband’s project cars.  They aren’t costing us much per year and aren’t worth a whole lot but if we needed to cut out expenses, some of the cars and insurance costs might have to go.)

- Gas & Electric.  (Outrageous, I know.  Our house isn’t exactly energy efficient.  We need to work on that.  In the meantime, we would just have to heat and cool our house less.)

- Food.  (I could probably get us down to about $50 a month.)

Keeping this list in my master finance spreadsheet helps me to keep my priorities right in front of my face.  I look at it daily.  I also have as much of this as possible in Yodlee, which is an awesome tool to monitor your accounts.  I need to keep this as a constant reminder in front of me because otherwise, it’s so very easy to slip up and forget something.  Even though I have most everything on my list automated, I really need a constant reminder that they exist.

I figured by listing out all of this, someone might get something substantial from this exercise like:

- Knowing where your money is going.  If you don’t, you can’t possibly keep it under control.

- Your bills are your obligations.  Keep them in front of you so you don’t forget them.

- In case of emergency or decrease in income, know what your priorities are and where you can cut back if absolutely necessary.

- Know the difference between luxuries and necessities.  Cable is a luxury.  More than one phone service provider is a luxury.  Wearing shorts around your house in the winter, also, is a luxury.  Food, gas, electric and shelter are examples of necessities.

I urge you all to try this out, if you haven’t already.  It really is a relief to have a grip on where your money is going and what your priorities are in case you need to trim them suddenly.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Related Posts:

• No related posts

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 1:00 am by Liz and is filed under Budgeting, Personal Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.