2017 Budget

With changes to our health insurance premium, it's time to re-hash our budget for the year. Our budget actually requires that hubs works 3 hours of overtime a check to pay for our daycare increase which happened when I went Monday-Friday. It's $100 more a month then before, but I get Saturdays at home with my boys and its nice to have a family day!

2017 Basic Monthly Budget

Expenses:

• Mortgage (P&I, Taxes and around $300 a month extra principle): $1,100.00
• HOA: $350.00
• Insurance (2 cars, Homeowners and Earthquake): $167.00
• Car/Smog Reg: $25.00
• Church Tithes & Giving: $642.00
• Gasoline/Tolls/Car Washes: $232.34
• Groceries: $333.00
• Business website: $16.15
• Pocket Money $70 ($35 each, includes our Netflix account)
• Daycare: $900.00 ($450 every 2 weeks)
• Little Dude: $90.00 (Diapers, wipes, clothes, books, toys, etc.)
• Discretionary: $77.50
• Dates/Eating Out: $100.00
• Cell Phones: $75 (We use trac-phone, so we put this aside to cover minute cards, charge cables and phone replacements).

Savings to be spent:

• Car Emergency Fund: $100
• Birthdays/Gifts: $50
• Christmas: $50
• Clothing: $52.52
• Replenish Savings: $101.19 (vacations, Dr. visits, Roxy expenses, etc.)

Extra Paychecks:

• New Car Fund: We get paid bi-weekly, so twice a year SCB and I each get an additional paycheck. We both know new cars will be needed around the same time, and we are cash people, not loan people, so we are working on saving for them now. Between these 4 extra checks we will receive, we hope to save $3,200 this year. (Daycare still comes out of hubby's extra checks for that 2 week period).  

More info on how it all works:

• We pay a most of our bills annually, or semi annually, but we "save" for them each month and list them as expenses to ensure we don't touch the funds. The items listed in our savings categories are listed there because we don't know when we will spend the money or if all the funds will be depleted, so we list them separately. 
• I have around 19 savings account with Capital One 360... and they are all labeled "clothes" or "vacation" etc. so I can pull funds out when needed, then replenish them each month and I don't accidentally spend them. Think of them as mini Back up emergency funds. 
• We also have worked hard to save up a fully funded emergency fund with $16,700.00 that is strictly for job layoffs (this is at least 3 months expenses for us -- I'll break it down in a future post). 

Profit Share/Tax Returns:

We try really hard not to give uncle sam more money then he is supposed to, so when we have windfalls like tax returns, or when my husbands job dishes out the annual profit share checks, we put this in our yearly "Slush Fund" to be spent on large ticket items throughout the year. Any money left in the slush fund at the end of December, gets put towards savings goals or as an additional retirement contribution.

Retirement: 

We are rocking around 10% in contributions between matches, pension contributions, etc, but until we figure out our housing plan, this is where it needs to be. You can view this more detailed post here on how we did last year.

Focus for the 1st half of 2017

Right now we are focusing on replenishing our Car Repairs and Medical savings accounts since those were depleted at the tail end of 2017.  We'd like to have $1k in each of those as a standard, so extra funds at the end of the month will go to our medical. Our Car repair budget has an auto replenish of $100 a month, but once we get our Medical to $1k, we will deposit the extra funds into the car fund until we get it back to $1k.