End of the Month

Most people in a professional setting get stressed out about the end of the month. It's time to crunch numbers, determine the budget, add up your expenses and see if you met your goals. It's really no different when you are a stay at home mom!

I am ashamed to say that April has been the first month that I have truly tracked my budget. Yes, I've been home with the boys for a year and a half now. Despite quitting my job, our lifestyle and finances haven't really changed. But I have a close friend who is a budget guru and I decided to be more like her! So in my mission to get organized, I created a family binder (more on that later). Included in my binder is my spending sheet and monthly budget sheet. I've been diligent about tracking receipts all month long.

I will give April an A on the budgeting score sheet. If there were such a thing!
For starters, our household income was $146.68 higher than I estimated. I do freelance work from home and can never be quite certain how much I will make. My husband's paychecks are the same each month. So I estimated my income based on an average of the last three months and combined the two. Yay for extra money! Also, we "under spent" in every category!

The second bit of good news is that I managed to stay under our grocery budget. A last-minute trip to the store almost put us over, but alas - I am $2.85 under budget for the month. AND - I had a good trip to the store this morning and paid $10.01 for a steak, a pound of hamburger, milk, wheat bread, cooking cream and bread crumbs. DEAL!

For April's budget, I really was not sure how much to budget for gas. I never really paid much attention to how often we filled our gas tanks, or how much we spent. So... I left that column blank. After tallying it all up, we spent $256.22 on gas this month. (I also realized that my husband and I are awful at pumping gas... we always have a few random cents instead of stopping on a round dollar amount. That bugs me. I'm weird.)

Other Category Updates
Diapers
Budgeted: $30   Spent: $13
Utilities
Budgeted: $232 Spent: $106
Cable
Budgeted: $135 Spent: $131
Easter
Budgeted: $30  Spent: $29.22

All in all, with the underspending, extra income and even with the addition of gasoline as a hefty budget line item, we still had $15 more in our discretionary income than I had accounted for. I budgeted $240.83 more than we needed to cover our expenses. Add in the gas expense, and we are still ahead. I think I'll transfer that extra bit into our savings, or split it between the boys.

On to May!