Mid Month Report on December Budget Goal

Posted on December 19th, 2007 by mmj

Last month I set a goal of doing a budget for December and tracking our spending.. My hope is that we can use it as a kickstart for monthly budgeting. I can say that I probably picked the worst month of the year to do this. December includes Christmas and 3 birthdays, as well as 2 anniversaries(including our own) in early January. This is not a good month for gifts.

I am happy to say that as far as tracking spending, we are doing pretty well. I still have to get a couple of receipts from the Mrs, but I have been as close as possible. I have been using a tricked out excell spreadsheet to track the daily spending and it has made things very easy. Just have to remember to get receipts for everything.

The one thing that has me scared is the auto budget. This includes gas, AAA, oil changes/maintenance. I was way off on our gas spending. It is 12/18 and we have already reached the budgeted amount for the month. We would be OK, I think, but the hospital trips and piano lesson trips really kill us. The piano lesson trip has gone from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, with a lot of stop lights. We need to rethink the lessons and see if we can move them back to the 5 minute trip.

Filed under: Budget

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2 Responses to “Mid Month Report on December Budget Goal”

  1. Meg, on December 23rd, 2007 at 10:10 pm Said:

    I’m going to start a budget thing in January as part of my New Years Resolution, and so the rest of December is more of a trial period to see how other people track their expenses, exploring new programs and whatnot.

    My expenses come under 4 categories-
    1. School (books, food on campus if I don’t eat in the cafeteria, tuition)
    2. Bills (utilities, cell phone, car insurance, rent)
    3. Debts (credit cards, loans)
    4. Miscellaneous (gas, car maintenance, groceries,etc)

    I found your site through How I Save Money, and added you to my blogroll, by the way.

  2. mmj, on December 24th, 2007 at 2:44 am Said:

    Hi Meg. Nice site you have there. Tracking day to day spending is a real eyeopener. I have already found a couple of spots we can work to reduce, such as groceries and a major problem area in auto gas. December is a crazy month to start, but I wanted to really get the ball rolling.

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