Current April Budget

Last night, we had our "budget meeting", which due to me being prepared with the numbers took a whole 10 minutes to review, then 15 minutes just discussing budgets in general. Here's what we're looking at:

Income:

$2600 My day job
$1100 Renters
$250 My part-time jobs

$3950 Total

Expenses:

$395 Tithe
$990 Mortgage
$300 Auto Gas
$244 Natural Gas
$40 House Phone
$40 Water
$130 Electric
$158 Cell Phone
$95 Life Insurance
$25 Wife's Haircut
$1238 Savings/Tax Return
$40 Garden & Driveway Repair
$125 Baby/Wife Clothing
$10 Job Chargebacks
$10 Capital One
$10 Dr. Bill
$10 Friends we owe
$30 Dining Out
$30 Wife's Fun Money
$30 My Fun Money

$3950 Total

This month we're building the savings, but it's probably going to go all to paying taxes (yuck). That's for another post. I had to cut back on my Garden & Driveway repair project money, but it will just force me to be creative (eg: take rocks from one side of our house to cover our driveway). We owe $500 to friends that basically told us "We want you to build an emergency fund first before you pay us back." Due to a series of events, this year they adopted a child and are expecting one as well in a few months, so we want to start paying them something since this is the first month we'll have more than a couple hundred dollars in the bank.

I also surprised my wife in a good way by taking our fun money out at the beginning of the month. My old habit was that I would take it out near the end "if we have the funds", which something "so important" would come up and we'd have to wait another month. I think that $30 for each of us will help us feel so much better about the budget than it will hurt us in the month.

The natural gas is the last month of it being this high, in May we will be at the monthly payment plan of $145. I know cell-phone is high, not much we can adjust on it right now, but if someone chips in the money for their phone this month it will be lower (They did last month, but then the following week asked if they could borrow money from us. We said no.).

Baby/Wife Clothing, I know some people may go "Why you spending so much on clothes?". We've decided to go with cloth diapers that my wife is making instead of disposable diapers, which I'll cover in another post.