South County Girl: January Spending + Feb Budget

Knowing you need to find almost $600 in your monthly budget to get all your accounts back in order can really help you keep your spending in line... At least that's what it did for SCB and I this month! Our spending actually looks quite low, but some of that is because we got $75 in Christmas money that we didn't have to include in our budget and we were in Utah for a few days at the beginning of the month and that spending was included in our 2012 numbers because it was from our 2012 holiday trip to Utah.

Since we need to put $571.83 back into my checking account (the money from our December car repair bill), we tried to be good about not wasting food, eating in, and generally just trying to cut back as best we could. I think we only ended up tossing out a head a broccoli, some sour cream, and one yogurt! (which is really good for us, especially on the produce end!)

January didn't offer us any overtime or extra revenue coming in, so we just had to make due with our budget... (and no awesome new job for me either) so the goal this month was to try and get a bit closer to our goal of putting all that money back into the bank account. Its so much easier to do our monthly budget when I don't have to wait for a paycheck to clear my account before paying bills. I never realized how much easier it is for me until this month so and i'm glad to say we made some very good progress.

I ended up transferring $25.53 from my emergency fund checking account, which was the 2 months of interest that was just sitting in there from Nov/Dec to make it a fresh $12,500.00.
Since we paid our January health insurance premiums in November when we applied, we took the $178.00 we had budgeted in this month, and applied it back to our checking account reserves. This bill is now set to auto pay on the first of every month to my credit card, so Feb's bill will be paid in Feb.
Then we took the left over money from paying our monthly bills (electricity, cells, and Internet), almost $80 left over from our groceries and household items and around $60 left from gas purchases since we both managed to squeak by with only one fill up once this month!

All and all, that leaves us with only $239.03 to replace, hopefully by the end of next month. I worked the holiday in January, so hopefully we can take that extra income and toss it towards the hole next month.

What we spent money on in January:

Groceries/Household Supplies: $158.34
Car:

Gasoline: $89.03
Car Registration: $81.00

Church Giving: $543 (We were out of town for DEC, so we cut Dec's Checks this month too)
Date Night/ Eating Out: $45.41 (we did 3 dates instead of 4 this month)
Cell Phones: $137.96
Internet: $35.14
Electricity: $44.52
House:

HOA: $262.50
Mortgage: $857.08 ($54.22 Extra Principle)

Clothes:

SCG: $17.27

Other:

Utah Corrections Board: $50.00

Not too bad if I do say so myself :)

February Budget:
Our budget for Feb looks very similar to our January budget. I'm still waiting for for our city council to approve a small cost of living adjustment that will cover the increase we will be paying to our pensions this year... so I'll just assume the numbers will stay the same for Feb that they did for Jan.

Paycheck 1: $1,355.88

Mortgage (P&I, Property tax, MIP, & $54.22 in extra principle): $857.08
Giving: $136.00
Fast Offering: $10.00
Groceries/Food/House Items: $240.00
Prescriptions & Doctor' Visits Fund: $50.00
Date Night/Discretionary Money: 62.80

Paycheck 2: $1,355.88