Fashion & Beauty
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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.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
F&B budget
How much do you budget per month (or annually) for F&B items? I am redoing our budget but haven't really kept track of how much we spend on clothing...my rough estimate on beauty is $1800/year (DH & I combined).
Re: F&B budget
Pomegranate Margarita
I sort of don't see the point of the question since this will vary wildly by income (and desire to spend the $$). I could easily spend $1,000 a month on f&b if I had the income to afford it (which I don't).
Including clothes, nails, cuts and highlights, waxing, and makeup I average about $350ish per month.
We don't really have a firm budget set. My H's salary covers all our expenses including meals and weekend entertainment. Essentially as long as I stay under my salary each month (which I do no problem) I'm good because whatever the "leftover" is goes into savings/investment.
Sorry, I'm sure that's probably no help, but if I had to guess I'd say I spend anywhere from $200-$400 a month on F&B related items. If I were doing a formal budget I'd probably put $400 just to be safe.
ETA: That would be assuming our job situations stayed the same. When I end up SAHM the F&B "budget" will be the main thing to get cut. I could easily stay under $200/month if necessary - under $100 most months since I have plenty of clothes built up. Right now I spend a lot on things I definitely do not need.
I don't budget for F&B purchases. We charge all expenses and pay them off monthly, so as long as our total Visa bill is less than a certain amount every month we're in good shape.
Our current budget is $215/month for clothes and beauty. I spend most of it, but we both get what we need.
I also get at least $40/month of Sephora cards from my Viggle points (iPhone app - if you don't have it, get it), so that adds to my budget.
If I want something above the budget, I use my personal fun money.
THanks for the responses ladies!
I know the answer will vary widely based on income, but I wanted to get an idea of what other people spend. We are going to try $250/month for F&B and see how that goes. That amount just sounded high in my mind (which could be b/c we are currently trying to beef up our efund before having kids)
A few months back, H and I started discussing our budget should I decide to quit my job. One of my big concerns was having my own spending money to do what I please with. H asked me how much I would feel comfortable with and I said $300 (this was not exclusively F&B items, but it mostly was). So I started keeping track of my expenses a little bit more carefully and sadly, $300 was not going as far as I thought it would. In reality it was closer to $500 (and I had a couple of months when I went a little crazy and it was much more than that).
We are able to afford that, but I know I really should be saving more money than I had been. When I lived in the suburbs it was much easier to control my F&B purchases, but now that I live in NYC I walk by boutiques with such fantastic stuff, that the temptation is high.
I'm not the type to buy a ton of stuff, but what I do buy isn't cheap. So I usually buy a couple of expensive items per month. I'm trying to live by a new shopping philosophy - trendy items need to be under $150. More expensive items need to stand the test of time (in other words will I be able to wear this 5-10 years from now?). Some exceptions are made, but I've been doing pretty well with this new philosophy.