In my last post I went over some pretty ugly numbers. Now I want to go over the things that happened that were just plain bad, but not so bad that they were ugly. Everyone has numbers like this. I think it would be hard to find someone who stayed on track for an entire year and had all roses and sunshine in their budget. I have some sunshine and roses, but in my last post I looked at the manure that was in my budget. Now I plan on looking at just the dirt.
Last year there were exactly 52 Mondays. This is important because our Jar money comes out on a Monday. I want to talk about that Jar money closely today. Typically we take out $315 each and every Monday. Here are the Jars and how that breaks done:
- Groceries – $100
- Jason – $40
- My wife – $40
- Dinner – $40
- Gasoline – $65
- Laundry – $10
- Church – $20
If I have that right then that should add up to $315. Now If we take those numbers above and multiply them out for the entire year we will see that we get some pretty big numbers. using my handy-dandy calculator with the “times 52″ button built-in I get these wonderful numbers:
- Groceries – $5,200
- Jason – $2,080
- My wife – $2,080
- Dinner – $2,080
- Gasoline – $3,380
- Laundry – $520
- Church – $1,040
This is what we should have spent in each category for the year. Well when I bring up the budget for last year and look at the numbers, I realize that we might have been over in most if not all categories. Here is the actual spending in those categories:
- Groceries – $6,291.54
- Jason – $2,017.26
- My wife – $1,847.91
- Dinner – $4,841.31
- Gasoline – $4,105.19
- Laundry – $490.00
- Church – $1,000.00
The category that shocked me the most was my allowance. I thought I’d be way over. The dinner out category also shocked me with it being a total of 132.75% over budget. I think we have found a very ugly number. Gasoline and groceries were both over budget but I think I’m going to stop here.
That dinner out number has put me into shock. Tomorrow, if I recover, we will look at the good side of last year.
This is where such meticulous record keeping has its advantages. You can definitely see where you did well, and where things wandered off path.