Political Crossfire Forums

What does your monthly net budget look like? If you want to avoid hard figures, just approximate the percentages. If you're anal and it doesn't add up to 100%, just realize you're probably rounding. I'll use mine as an example:

Car Payments: 0% (Paid off)
Car Insurance: 4%
Rent: 15%
Utilities: 13%
Food/beer: 15%
Toiletries: 5%
Clothes: 5% (I don't really care about updating my wardrobe)
Pleasure: 15%
Gas/Oil/Repairs: 8%
Savings: 20% (Sometimes 10% with pleasure going up to 25%)

I have no idea. I don't do budgets. Being single and making a decent amount of money, I can pretty much buy the stuff I need when I need to and not have to worry about budget. Most of my money is probably being spent on food, though that is a change I'm working on rapidly. In the past 2 weeks, I've saved roughly $85 on food. Not a huge amount of money but it adds up and I'm trying to do better. I'm trying to cook a large amount of food at the beginning of the week then eating it as left overs so I am not lazy and go grab takeout.

I'm also in a situation where I don't have a car payment, car insurance payment, cell phone bill, pay for fuel for my vehicle, nor for vehicle repairs.

So anyways, roughly my bills for a month:

Rent: 22%
Utilities vary by winter/summer but I would say average is around: 5%
Entertainment (tv, internet, etc): 11%

Thats really all I keep track of until recently. If I had to guess on food, it would be around 22%.

my budget changes A LOT depending on what i am doing

when i am working/petitioning it is usually something like this

hotel: $25/day (split room with friend, avg bid on priceline is $40-45, usually $50 after tax for $25 each split). am reimbursed around half of the time, so monthly total will go from $750 to $375
food/cigarettes/coffee: $25/day - $750/month
car rental: $150/week on avg, split two ways so around $11/day each. again, a reimbursed around half of the time so the monthly total of $330 will drop to $165
gas: split it, and reimbursed around 20% of the time. prolly $4/day or $120/month avg
misc/entertainment: this is the trickiest one. on months where i dont do anything, just go on computer after work, maybe $100/month. but this portion can also easily be over $1000/month. lets just say $500/month average.
avg monthly budget when petitioning: $1910/month

i've been crashing at one of my familys places the last three weeks and will likely stay at least another couple week unless something pops up. in situations like this my budget is EXTREMELY low. spending maybe $15/day right now. have a car again, so all i need to buy is gas and food.

my long term vacation budgets i calculate by weeks, not months. to me $7000 = good for 10 weeks. $10,000 = good for 15 weeks. $12,500 good for 20 weeks. $15,000 good for 6 months and so on.

We keep expenses under half of income as a rule.

Oh ya. Two incomes, one household, no kids. Allows you to save aggressively.

I've never heard of redoing a kitchen every six months. Must be awesome to be a cabinetmaker.