A native Californian transplanted in southern Illinois.I have been plugging my budget numbers into a big spreadsheet all year. Now that the year is over, I can look back and see how I did. The spreadsheet is big, so what I am sharing here is my YTD Variance.
What this means:
Wages - I earned $482 less than budgeted
Child Supt - I received $452 more than budgeted
Miscellaneous - I received $11,733.43 more than budgeted. (This is my bonus, my seasonal overtime, my income tax refund, and all small streams of income.)
Mortgage - I paid an extra $442.43
Groceries - I spent $3 less than budgeted
Utilities - I spent $224 more than budgeted
Visa - I spent $700 more than budgeted
Savings - I saved $288 more then budgeted
Cr Crd Debt - I paid $2476 more than budgeted
Cash Allow - I spent $200 more than budgeted
Roth - I contribued $2550 more than budgeted. (My budgeted amount would not allow me to hit my target of 3k per year. So this is necessary)
Medical CoPays - I spent $200 less than budgeted, but I did away with this category and lumped it into "Everything Else".
Travel - I saved $400 less than budgeted
Pest - Exactly as budgeted
Gym - I spent $17 more than budgeted, because of the partial month at sign up.
Life Ins - Exactly as budgeted
Everything Else - I spent $5593 more than budgeted.
So all in all, I spent/saved $11,887.43 more than budgeted, and received $11,703.43 more than budgeted.
In 2012, I want to work on not spending more than budgeted and trimming expenses so I can find more dollars to save/invest/prepay mortgage.
2011 Budget Report
January 3rd, 2012 at 05:41 pm
January 4th, 2012 at 02:20 am 1325643627
January 4th, 2012 at 03:49 pm 1325692162
January 4th, 2012 at 09:00 pm 1325710831
Also, I don't track how I spend my cash allowance. I just consider it gone when I withdraw it twice per month.