Budgeting

I get paid twice a month and my wife gets paid every two weeks. So twice a month, at the beginning and then end of the month, my wife and I sit down and fill out our budget. For the most part, expenses are the same each time. For example, the bills and expenses we have on January 1 are the same as February and the same goes for January 15 and February 15. So we always have a pretty definite idea about how much money it's going to take to live. And we stick as close as we can to the amount we budget for food, gasoline and clothing. We have an envelope for each of those categories and in those envelopes goes a specific amount of cash that we use to pay for the those items so once the money in the food envelope is gone, we don't buy any more food until the next period comes. Now we make sure we have enough money in there to start but yet we make sure we're not putting in more money than what we need. Any and all extra money we have goes toward debt.

I use an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (any spreadsheet program will suffice) for budgeting. And the guy over at I Love Debt has an awesome one you can download for free. It's helped us tremendously because with a spreadsheet you just plug in the numbers (pay, expenses, etc.) and the addition and subtraction is done automatically thanks to mathematic formulas. I started in September and have been going strong ever since. With the spreadsheet I've been able to budget out several months to see how quickly we'll pay off our debts. Now the numbers do change from month to month so you just plug those in as they happen.