Monday, March 05, 2007
En Cuanto al Dinero
Whew!!!!!!! It feels good to have the budget up-to-date.
Some background: I wrote a budget computer program about nine years ago that I've made new versions of periodically. The latest version of the one I use is about four years old. I successfully used the versions I wrote while I was in the Navy to keep track of what I was spending money on and use that to fine-tune the monthly allotments to each category (I have about 25 of them). Back then, I stuck to it with a firm discipline and saved up enough money to buy that Trans-Am that I ended up wrecking last year.
The whole idea of the budget program is that you figure out how much of what you make each month you can allot to each category, and then you spend less than or the same as that amount of money on that category, and your balance carries over to the next month. Since Becky and I have been married, though, the only purpose the budget has really served is tracking our expenses. That was mostly due to the fact that for a lot of that time, we really weren't making enough to meet our essential needs, so watching a bunch of negative balances grow more negative didn't tell us much about what we could spend on each category. It was also due to the fact that I had found a bug in the program (which I fixed before making the project-based version) that was messing up some of the balances, and I hadn't had the time since then to recalculate what the balances really should be.
Well, this weekend I finally found that time, and I ran some reports from the back-end database to compare monthly income to monthly spending. I figured out that we're still spending hundreds more per month than we make, and that even by cutting out all non-essentials, we're still spending significantly more than we make. So, Becky and I discussed what we could do about that. We've identified some individual expenses within a few essential categories that we're going to try cutting out of our spending over the next couple months to see if that's really feasible and how big of an impact that makes. Maybe we'll find some more things that we really can cut out if that works. The other thing is, we really need to move--but either to a bigger apartment where we pay hundreds less than we pay now for more space than we have now or into a house that, from what we've seen, would really have to be out-of-state for us to be able to afford it (since living in a gang or drug infested area is on our not-going-to-do-that list). Perhaps first an apartment in a lower area relatively close to family and then a house later, but it doesn't look like we'll be able to just cut our costs significantly enough to pay a few hundred dollars more in mortgage than we're now paying in rent and still expect to make ends meet. That's a bit of a disappointment to us, but better that we see reality for what it is than get into something now that ends up destroying us financially a few months or a couple years down the road.
