I think I'm ready to take the next step in budgeting, we've gotten good at staying within our income, and meeting some savings goals, but I'd like to make some more formal choices. We're meeting short term goals quite well, but I'd like to start figuring out how to meet some of the long term goals more effectively.

The problem is, I don't know how I'm meeting my short-term goals, because every time I try to add up the categories in my budget, I end up showing that I'm running at a deficit. Yipes. So, anyone have pointers for figuring out this sort of thing?

Other than to suggest looking at your actual bank statements I'm not sure. You must either be spending less than you plan to, or be running short of money .

That's the thing, I'm using the information from MS money. And I've actually been upping what I put in savings each month.

October recap is up http://www.morydd.net/october-finance-recap

Slow but steady is the watchword this month. Nothing exciting to report, but nothing terrible. either. The next month should be good.

I'm having a similar problem, but the opposite. I'm using Gnucash and it's telling me my net worth is increasing, and I don't see how it possibly could be given that I've had 2 really terrible months.

Sometimes I want to calculate by hand to be sure, but darned if I never have the time. If you can find the time to sketch a few things down and it's helpful let me know.

There's something about the electronics that makes me not trust them, or rather myself.

I defaulted on a student loan. Twice. The first time was just stupidity. The second time is because after it went through the rehabilitation process, they sold it to a lender (Nelnet), but didn't tell me who they sold it to. I wasn't tracking my finances properly, so it didn't register with me that suddenly that money wasn't coming out of the account. Nelnet's envelopes looked to me like advertising for some online company, so I didn't open them. Again, dumb. Anyway, the loan defaulted again, went to the state's loan service, racked up a crapload of collection costs and fees, and re-entered the rehab process. After the October payment it got transfered to another company. This time, I actually called, found out who it was transfered to, and then called them to figure out what was going on. Turns out that there won't be any payment due in November, so I called the owner of one of our other loans (the highest interest rate debt we have left) and scheduled a payment to that loan with the money that was budgeted to the loan that's got a month off. I'm quite proud of myself. We've decided we're going to try to up our loan payments a bit as well and start snowballing those down.

I've got the tracking, and spending wisely to a good point. Now I need to figure out a way to budget. I want something easy to do, and with charts. Lots of charts.

Any suggestions?

So, I hadn't really paid attention to the math of it, but last night I realized that we are putting almost 20% of our gross pay directly into savings right now! And I'm still trying to make that number go up, because it's not a stretch. Holy cow. A little over a year ago, putting away 5% of just my takehome pay felt like I was doing good.

Man. Good Job. I keep telling myself I should up my 401k contribution as a way to force myself to live on less, but somewhere deep inside me is a spoiled brat who says "NO!"

You've inspired me. I think I'll make the change after the 1st of the year.

I updated the "Goals" section of the sidebar of my blog today. Now it lists all of the (current) goals in order and shows the progress overall and on the current goal.

So, we were working on the budget for the holidays... it goes so fast. $40 here and $40 there adds up to $1000 a lot quicker than I'd like. Hopefully I've over-estimated several of the things in the budget, but I suspect I'm not going to be getting my wife quite as nice of a gift as I'd hoped.

I had a minor financial setback the yesterday.

As I was waiting for the bus, I dropped my wallet (which is a metal cigarette case) and everything fell out. I gathered everything together and got on the bus, and as I was trying to get things back into my wallet a kid reached over the seat and grabbed the $20 bill and ran out the back door of the bus.

The thing is, two years ago, losing $20 would 've been a serious financial blow. Now, it's merely an annoyance. Before, I would have been stressed out for days, now by time I got to work, I was fine. Yet another example of how there are benefits to financial stability that aren't simply financial.

I know some little boy who's getting a lump of coal in his stocking.

My old list looked like this:
Student Loan: $3k
Home Downpayment: $10K
Roth IRAs: $10K

My new list looks like this:

Baby:OMGWTFLOLBBQ!!!!111!!!!!

Yeah... Time to reprioritize. We need to replace the car sooner than we had planned (No AC and one window doesn't roll down, and the horn doesn't work, and it's got almost 170K miles, most of them city, and it's 10 years old.) There's time off work, day care, etc. Wheeeee!

Congratulations!

Congrats! Keep us posted on the new priorities and how you meet them. I look forward to hearing about the journey.