My budget goals for October are:
Limit groceries to $300. We had great success with last month’s challenge keeping groceries at $250, and we still have soooo much food left. It’s kind of unreal. Upping to $300 to still be frugal but not feel deprived (this is for 2 adults).
Put $500 in my Traditional IRA. I have 2 good freelance checks coming so I know the money is there. I want to make the money work rather than just throwing it in a bunch of categories and stress shopping.
I’m in! I have been budgeting for ages but the past couple of months have been really bad at it
and I have struggled to do no spend days in September. I’m on a bit of a tighter budget at the moment and it would be so nice to stay within the limit.
For October I want to focus on 2 categories:
I’m going to give it a try!
Oct is going to be a weird one; I’ll be moving into a place I am currently renovating. So I’ve got a renovations budget I will be trying to stick to and I want to try to be mindful about spending $ when it will make things easier / smoother for this transition, because I am historically really bad at that: I tend to pinch pennies and fully aggravate myself by making life harder basically on purpose: case in point, I really shouldn’t have decided to remove popcorn ceiling myself, but I had trouble getting a contractor to even quote it for me and just decided to go for it. its gross and I’ve had to take two days off from work so far to get it done. Timing is also important so if I can afford to pay someone to do a thing instead of flailing around trying to do it myself I really ought to go for it.
I want to be in, but my money spending is somewhat inflexible right now, and also unpredictable (anyone who’s read my journal recently knows why). But I do want to manage my time better. Can I do a time budget instead? (Although in most cases I am trying to fill UP buckets until they overflow, rather than restrict them (filling them up is easier than trying to arbitrarily try to restrict some other categories (like mindless internetting), but the end result is sort of the same…))??? I was doing the best on my learning goals back before I decided to sell when I set goals for certain activities every day. I guess this is sort of the same as the previous month, so maybe not…
I’m planning a time budget, too! Even though that is what I’ve done the last 2 months. It is working for me and I need to continue.
I’m also planning on focusing on time more than money.
I’m going to go for an actual full budget, which I usually do, but I don’t tend to track on a weekly basis (I just input as I go and then reconcile at the end of the month). Overall, my big goals right now are savings, charity, and increasing non-day job income.
So - goals are:
Savings Goal: $1,665
@Crow @CalBal @katscratch Time budgets are fine (time and money are quite interlinked, aren’t they!?) - You will get the stickers as long you do the check-ins!
OMG, is it OMD tea release month?!
YES FINALLY.
Oooh. I wasn’t going to do this month, because I don’t really money budget. But I like time budget idea now that I’ve built several habit stacks in my day, and I want to track/figure out the big unhabit-ed (Uninhabited?) parts of the day.
I always have a budget and we usually approach it more as a guideline for tracking expenses instead of a strict budget. This month we are going to super focus on the food categories to stay below $450 for groceries and $175 for eating out (For one athlete adult, one pregnant adult, and one toddler). We are going to aim for one large Costco trip this weekend and then small trips to the grocery store weekly for perishables, so the spending will be heavily weighted toward the beginning of the month.
OK, it’s October 1! Time to get a baseline!
…car insurance is due this month and I’m $41.59 short. This is presumably because I increased the food budget by $50 this month to reflect what I feel are actual needs (though interestingly, when I look at the average of the last 6 months, it’s just below the original budget, so I guess we were doing better than I thought).
Anyway, we have plans to need babysitting exactly once this month and MIL is doing it for free. It’s not like we can go out much even if we wanted to pay a babysitter! So I’m going to just transfer that babysitting money right to the car insurance category.
This was a three-paycheck month, but I sent the third paycheck straight to the emergency fund, which is still low (after the huge mess that was May), but is at least at a better level now.
I’m in for a Budget-tober challenge! Definitely want to spend less this month on…
a) craft supplies. No more crazy fabric stash buys (or at least keep it to 1…)
b) takeaway… keep it to 2x a week max. This is the main way we’ve been supporting our community though, so fudging this to 3x depending on schedules may be okay.
I also want to get a baseline and re-do the spreadsheet my financial planner gave me many moons ago to understand where my $ went. I paid off most debts with my stock vest from work, so I’d like to keep credit card expenditures to a minimum over all and start building up savings/ an emergency fund again.
Bring on the budgeting! 
I’m going to do both time and money budgets.
Money:
Time:
Yay!
I have budgeted on and off for years and have fallen off the haywagon during the pandemic. I am going to use this challenge to get back on. I have noticed that when I’m not budgeting, I tend to save more and struggle with spending money even on more necessary categories. The whole idea of budgeting is permission to spend definitely applies to me.
My main goals are:
I’m in! I’ve budgeted before, but I took a break when the pandemic hit and I need to take a closer look at things. I want to see how my spending has changed now that I’m not going out much.
I was trying to figure out how to participate in this, because I already track and adjust categories for everything we spend. Possibly daily. Because I think it’s fun!
But if we are doing time budgets too, I’m TERRIBLE with using my time well, so I’m in for that.