need help setting up budget

amother

Mon, Jul 18 2011, 4:07 pm

I know the easy way of fixing this is to cut up the CC but I'm trying to figure this out without doing that because I dont think my dh would go for it.

every monthly budget form has spots to put in phone, food, clothing etc amounts
there is also an amount for CC

now we pay our CC full each time (sometimes throughout the month)
we put EVERYTHING on the CC

how do I write in the detailed amounts on the budget without counting expenses twice?

the only solution I can think of is to have 2 budgets, a main family budget and another one just for the CC.
(I will use $10,000 as an amount for purpose of the example.)

So on the household budget I would set aside $10K on the CC line to pay the CC.
The 10K would be a debit being paid from my bank (credit).
Then,I would make a second budget for the CC.
I would place $10,000 as the income.
I would then budget for phone, food, etc.
Then after adding up all the amounts it would need to sum to $10K.

Mrs Bissli

Mon, Jul 18 2011, 4:28 pm

My budget is divided by categories, regardless of whether it's paid in cash, C/C or cheque. Having two accounts, one for cash and one for C/C, is not only confusing but can be misleading. You may think you managed your (cash) budget with surplus but it doesn't mean anything if you're just piling things up on your C/C!

One tip of advice is, record C/C item when you SWIPE, not when you get a statement/make actual payment. I use a plain excel table that would look like this (just an example)

Cash Cheque/dir debit C/C Total spent Budget
Mortgage
Tuition/Childcare
Insurance/pension savings
Charity
Car/transportation/fuel
Food
Clothing
Household
Entertainment
TOTAL

That way you capture everything you spent regardless of payment method. It's the two far right columns you need to balance, ie monthly budget vs actual spent. For this you can either do absolute amount (eg $480 spent on food vs $600 budget so you have $120 left for the month), or as a % (480/600 = 80% of monthly budget spent vs 18th day of the month/31 = 58%)
This is my monthly sheet. I also have annual/multiyear sheet where I only

busydev

Mon, Jul 18 2011, 4:45 pm

we make our budget each month. we use our cc for almost everything but we use it as a debit card (only if we have the $ in the bank)

we use excel and have it devided into income and expenses

income has 3 sections:
balance (amount from the month before that is not yet paid for- such as cc bill and uncashed checks)
allowance (budgeted amt for that month)
other (for any income other then paychecks)

total

expenses - we have a line for each utility bill, insurance etc. we also include the cc payment for that month (which is off set by the balance line in income)

then in the next column over we write in every cc swipe that we do. it gets totaled in a line under expenses.

Faigy86

Tue, Jul 19 2011, 1:34 pm

Are you talking about a budget worksheet for estimating projected expenses? In such a sheet, cc would refer to paying off credit card debt - which you have said you don't have. If you are referring to an expense tracker of some sort, the only place that it makes a difference is if you are tagging the method of purchase or reconciling your cc statement...

amother

Tue, Jul 19 2011, 1:55 pm

pks wrote:

OP HERE

thanks that makes a lot of sense. thanks for the clarification!