How do you determine "fun money" amounts?

jlaOK · August 2014

DH and I are in the last stretch of our "gazelle intensity" time. We are debt free, have our 3-6 month e-fund, and are building our forever home. We are trying to save as much as we can while we build that way we can put more money down and have money for things like blinds, fence, storm shelter, etc. We started our debt free journey before having kids and haven't adjusted our "fun money" since. We are realizing that we may need to up the amounts for our family of 4 but don't want to go crazy. For reference, our budget now has $60/month each for DH and I and $120/month for the family. How do you decide how much fun money you really need?

smbenevides1989 · August 2014

We have a couple of fun money totals. DH has $40/week, I have $20/week. We also have a joint spending of $20/month for movies or going to a bounce house with DD. We have a weekly eating out budget of $25. We just go grab pizza, subway, burgers, etc.

Since we moved on to a monthly budget based, we still keep those variables, but I just w/d the money at the beginning of the month. If we have a 4 week month, he gets $160, I get $80, and dining is about $100. (A 5 week month is $200, $100, $125 respectively). I'm currently saving for a whole wardrobe update for myself, while DH is saving some of his for a new Gi.

brij2006 · August 2014

vlagrl29 · August 2014

We don't budget fun money. I guess our eating out can be considered fun money. Occasionally we have a date night or go see a movie as a family. It's really never more than $20 a month for family or if we do have a date night we usually spend anywhere from $40-$80 depending on the activity.

brij2006 · August 2014

I feel like I should add that we rarely ever spend the entertainment budget. If we want to be entertained then we do something free like taking the dog for a walk, visit our parents, have friends over for dinner, or rent from Redbox for $1.50. Last month we spent $5 from the entertainment budget and so far this month we went to a movie for $17.50 then said we won't go again unless it's a major movie we want to see, because that was enough to buy a movie we could watch any time we wanted at home.

CuriousKiddosMama · August 2014

We do 100 each a month. It has worked for us so far, but we also budget for eating out, movies and that type of thing. I'm not sure that we will adjust our fun money as kids grow, because that is for us.
One thing we will end up doing is something my parents did for us every summer. We had a garage sale every spring and the cash from that was our 'summer fun' money. That was what we used for the pool, movies and whatever we wanted to do as kids growing up. We knew once the money was gone it was gone, so we were pretty conservative with it until august!

CuriousKiddosMama · August 2014

Oh and we also have a baby budget line item- so if I want to do Gymboree or something like that it would come out of that part of the budget.

Xstatic3333 · August 2014

We usually budget $100 each for each biweekly paycheck. This includes all eating out, lunches/coffees on the run, and alcohol. It also includes smaller clothing purchases and my personal care/beauty items (I'm pretty low maintenance). H's goes mostly to video games and tech stuff. We have a very hard time staying within this budget. It's tough when we see friends who want to go out and aren't on a similar budget system. I don't want to rub our budget in their faces, and it looks bad to say "we can't afford it" when we clearly could, but are working on other goals. Often I'll pre-eat at home and use the need to utilize CSA vegetables as my excuse. I'm impressed you're all finding lower amounts easy!

jlaOK · August 2014

Hmm. Now I'm feeling like we are over spenders. Our fun money also includes eating out but $30/week is really only enough to do 1 thing. I'm impressed with how frugal you all are.

bnunn03 · August 2014

I am very impressed by your fun budgets! We each get $40 a week and that goes towards anything we want, no questions asked. For me, I usually spend it on clothes or out to eat with girlfriends. H spends his on bars or frisbee golf discs or whatever.

jessica490 · August 2014

We both started at $100ea. bi-weekly. We realized we didn't really spend it all, so we drop down to $60-$80 for each of us. We just basically take out what we think we will need. Sometimes we don't spend it all, so we will put that towards our next fun money withdrawals.

brij2006 · August 2014

jlaOK said:

Hmm. Now I'm feeling like we are over spenders. Our fun money also includes eating out but $30/week is really only enough to do 1 thing. I'm impressed with how frugal you all are.

For everything you have within that $30/week I don't think it looks too low.

It's just all on how you categorize it. Ours is $75/month for eating out, $75/month for entertainment, and $30 each for "mad money." If our eating out or entertainment budget is tapped out and one of us wants to go for coffee with friends, then our mad money comes into play or we don't go.

Wulfgar · August 2014

We have $40 every pay check for misc. spending and we get paid twice a month so we have $80 total in misc. for the month. If we want to do more things then this we decide who has spare money that is not allocated to do what we want or we dip into our vacation account.

We do minimize the amount we eat out and spend on activities. If we have a bad month, we try to reduce our activities the next month. Where we really go over budget is when we do a date night usually once a quarter to somewhere nice where we spend in the $60 to $90 range on dinner for our family of 3.

Our budget will be tighter starting this month since we changed our cell phone plan, have pre-school tuition, and will be paying MIL $25 more a month to help them out. ILs still are in semi-denial that they are having money issues especially since FIL will be turning 60 next year and will most likely retire about the time SIL graduates from High School in 6 years.

als1982 · August 2014

Every two weeks we each get $150 to use much like @AprilH81 and her husband do. Things like lunch out if we don't want to bring from home, happy hour with friends or co-workers, both work and weekend clothes and makeup (but things like shampoo, conditioner and bodywash come out of the grocery budget), etc. My H uses a big chunk of his for sports season tickets and typically goes to the movies every weekend too.

Every two weeks we also get $100 for shared entertainment, which is basically what we use for weekend plans and dinner out, or if we walk on a weeknight to get dinner in the shopping center near our home.

How do you determine "fun money" amounts?

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