Bare Bones Budget

 <random tangential* story>  I bought a pair of shoes from someone on Facebook (did you know Facebook had buy/sell/trade groups now? They're pretty fabulous). Tonight I met the girl I purchased them from in a parking lot (no it's safe, I promise...) she texted me "I'm in a white Lexus". I was immediately aware of what my car looks like. I don't often have those moments of feeling like an awkward middle schooler again, being immediately embarrassed of everything about yourself. Umm...I'll be in a rusty 20 year old Nissan with prominent hail damage that someone tried to buff out. Oh and I look like a hoarder/homeless person who lives in my car because I'm stage managing a show right now and we don't have permanent rehearsal space. So there are boxed of random props in my trunk and backseat. Most of those props are suitcases. I know I've used this illustration here before but it's just fitting for so many things! I pretty much felt like this:

Do you need a teapot? How about a pitcher?

How silly we are to be embarrassed by what we have/don't have. I'm perfectly happy with my little clunker, she's paid for and gets me from point A to point B. </random tangential* story>

  *Tangential is a real word, I looked it up.

Now back to the post I actually meant to write. One of our New Year's resolutions is to go back to a pretty bare bones budget in order to be able to pay even more on our student loans. I use the Gazelle Budget on the Dave Ramsey website to make our monthly budgets. He gives the percentage that ideally should go towards each category (basically to make sure you aren't spending 75% of your income on one category!).

 I thought it might be fun to pull up a side-by-side and compare our percentages to the recommended percentage. The budget will end up changing each month throughout the year depending on dentist appointments, car repairs, etc. This is just our basic budget. For the months that it varies we will put less towards our student loans and more to other categories.

 There are a few other categories in the outline that we don't build into our regular budget (clothing, car repairs, etc). If we have a car issue we put money towards it instead of putting so much toward the student loans but still paying the minimums. For clothing we just plan that for the next month, we don't really have clothing "emergencies", that just seems ridiculous.

So if we can stick to this we'll be living on about 40% of our income, I think that's pretty awesome. That means the student loans will go away quickly and we'll get to go to Ireland! That's our "heck yes we're out of debt, we are awesome!" reward. Trust me, we'll have earned it.

Good night!