Money Matters
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Re: could you live off of $350/week
Easily, and we are in a VVVHCOL area ($3.50 for a bottle of coke, $2.60 for a doughnut!).
Clothes get their own budget category because of the $$.
If I told H that all the bills/gas were covered and we had $1400 a month to spend on groceries and whatever his little heart desired, he would be over the freakin moon.
yes we have debt. SL's and 1 car payment. 65k SL's and 20k car. Our take home after taxes, retirement, and health insurance is 7k. Also my husbands company pays for his car, gas, home office (internet, phone, fax, cable) on top of the 7k. We are also saving each month the total cost of daycare plus baby extras and we have a healthy savings account now.
Thanks for all the advice, I will share this post with my husband.
Nope, if you see my above post, I mistook $17 2 for $172
Kelly Monaghan's 5K - 5/15/11 - 3rd Place in AG
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Ridley Run 3.1 - 4/14/12 - 1st race of the year, 32:45
Are you guys all assuming this is just grocery/fun money?
I'm picturing including things like minor home repairs/improvements, car maintenance, copays/medical bills, pet expenses, and all the life stuff that comes up. Maybe some of you are assuming that comes out of savings or some other budget category (FSA?)
We have about $1800 a month allotted to groceries/misc and we struggle to stay within it some months. Others, not so much. Our "fun" spending is far, far less than that, but it seems that nearly every month has some expense that is a few hundred dollars and I think averaging $350 a week would be do-able but not as much of a breeze as people make it sound.
This month we spent $70 on an oil change/new wipers for DH's car, $60 on a lawn treatment, I'm taking the dogs to the vet for probably $120 or so this week, I bought a shower gift for $30, got my hair cut for $27, $100 on 3 pairs of new pants because my old ones don't fit anymore, and we've already spent about $300 on groceries. Aside from maybe the haircut, those were all necessary and that doesn't even include any eating out, personal spending (I bought a $10 Kindle book), etc.
Yeah, I was kind of guessing that I would be OK on $350/week, but if you add up those things you mentioned, they're only about $400 for the month, so average about $100/week? And add about $100-$150/week for groceries and you're at $200-$250, which still leaves another $100-$150 for "other things that come up".
And I also think that if I were trying to live on a baby budget / tight budget, I'd be more careful about the little things. I have enough room in my budget that I don't really carefully track things, but I can cut back if necessary - like if we eat out 3 times one week, we might not eat out the next week at all, etc.
Germany 2012
I was assuming the #50 was after all bills/savings/retirement were accounted for.
I put aside money each month to cover house/car repairs/gifts (savings) so if that expense came up, it would come out of the appropriate fund, not the $350.
But even then, most of what you have listed are not monthly/weekly events.
Definitely not THESE things weekly/monthly, but there is always stuff. My budget spreadsheets are on my work computer, but I know I'm always amazed at how quickly our money seems to go, especially when much of the time I feel like we haven't even done anything special.
I guess it depends on how you budget. We just pay for things out of our monthly income (unless it is something truly big that we need to save up for). If things are a few hundred dollars we usually just take it out of our monthly income.
No, I assumed this money needs to go for everything she (and you) mentioned, not just food and fun money. As I said in my post, my fairly fixed weekly expenses add up to about $150 for groceries, going out and gas. That leaves about $800/month for the other things. Unless something unexpected were to come up, I don't *think* I typically spend that every month, even if I were to average the annual or semi-annual costs into those numbers. I guess it could be close though.
I will say that my answer of "yes, we could live on that" would more than likely be a "maybe" if we lived in the states.
Our/my spending has drastically changed since moving here. Mainly because, even if we can afford things, I refuse to pay the outrageous prices they charge here. For example, the $2.60 doughnut from a Dunkin Doughnut type place. I haven't had a doughnut in almost two years. Try $3.90 for a Twix bar. Yeah, we don't buy candy either. 99% of our US impulse purchases are passed right on by.
We could definitely live off of that, I think we might even live off less than that now
Well, you also have 5 people in your household and are including gas. The OP has 2 adults and gas is not included in the $350.
jilly, I counted all of those things in my proposed budget. That is the $300 miscellaneous category that I threw in there.
Sigh. We could definitely live on ~$1500/month in spending money, but as it is now we spend much more than that. In the past two months, we've renovated our bathroom, bought a new sofa, and I just went out of town for a long weekend. Not to mention socializing at restaurants and bars. But if we were motivated to get our spending under control, we could do that.
#bigspender
This is where we run into problems, and I'm guessing other people do too. Something "comes up" at least once a month, and if you do not budget for these miscellaneous things then you will blow your budget. Car repairs, vet bills, wedding/baby/birthday/Christmas presents, travel, etc.
No. but I budget to eat out 3-4 days a week. That way if we get lazy, or don't have time to hit the grocery store, or forget our lunches, or there aren't enough leftovers, we have enough cash to not stress over it.
If gas/ parking weren't included I think we could do it. Home repairs and maintance are also a big $$ area for us. We spend an average of 50.00 a week at HD or Lowes most of the time. Uggh
$350/week is pretty much our budget. That includes fun money, eating out, clothes, hair, shoes, gas, groceries, etc. It's tight. Sometimes, we decide to "save" a portion of this for something bigger, or decide to pull money from a different pot for a date night or something. But, generally, we stick to the $350. (It's actually $700 every two weeks, each of us gets $350 every two weeks...)
It's kind of hard. We've discussed upping our allowances to $400 each... but, we still have some other financial goals to meet first.
Yes, we could (we don't usually though) but it's always difficult to put yourself on a spending diet when there's not a savings goal. What's your savings goal for this? Paying off your car? Saving for maternity leave?
All that said, we totally splurged on things we couldn't do with kids when I was pregnant: fancy meals out, nice vacations, etc. We could afford it & weren't sacrificing any savings goals & i don't regret it for a second. Date nights are few & far between right now and the thought of taking my wiggly/loud 1-year-old on a plane ride makes me break out into hives!
Currently we probably exceed that for extras, as we eat out a fair amount. It could easily be scales back to $150-200 if necessary.
Wow I feel like sh!t. I don't even make $350 in a week.
Anyways, I agree with having all 'spare money' as cash. Or sign up for themint.com or a similar site. I really like that it allocates portions of money monthly (ie: my dog gets groomed every 6-8 weeks but it takes out a certain % of money for that month so I don't spend it).