structure + budget

How do you plan your budget? What do you do with the money you save on a purchase? How closely do you stick to your budget? We feel like these are questions we have debated too many times to count. We have been working on Project Money for over a month now and are really excited about the progress we have made so far. The last couple weeks have been pretty fun and informative as we learn about the various services and tools Summit Credit Union offers free to its members. We have had a lot of help from our financial coach, Nic, who has been great at showing us around and getting us hooked up with things. Turns out he’s more than a coach — he’s a structural engineer!

We feel like we are heading into a new phase of Project Money, one where we are ready to start applying what we have learned and working within the financial structures Nic has helped us build. If you follow us on social media, you will see that we now have ten savings accounts for everything from pets to property taxes. With the automatic transfers, we are starting to see money moving into those accounts and feeling good about our emergency fund, home repairs, tax planning and more. Even smaller deposits, like money saved on our cellular plan, now have a place to go and it feels that much more impactful.

Part of having a solid financial structure is having a sound budget. In the past, we had been great at creating a “budget,” but we rarely stuck to it. We’d usually come close, and might have even spent below our limits in areas, but we treated our budget like a rough idea that came out of a brainstorming session. Our challenge is to look at how we have spent our money in the past, and to look ahead at how we can do a better job of sticking to the plan we create. We aren’t talking extreme measures here, but we are looking a lot more closely at what we buy and how much we pay for it. We will admit we haven’t always paid a lot of attention to that, because “big deal, you saved a buck.” Well, now that we have a place to put that buck and to see its impact, we are a lot more interested in finding other bucks in other places.

So, we are in a brand new month and it’s the perfect time to take on our budget and set it up in Summit’s Climbr® so we always have it with us. Our goal is to stick to it as much as possible, and see just how well we can do. Stay tuned for our progress! In the meantime, how do you budget and how close do you come to sticking to it?