Where the Hell is my Money

When creating my budget, I pretty much just looked at how much I was already spending, and where, and wrote that down.  I have read in magazine articles and such that your expenses should be broken down by percentages, but I didn't really know what those percentages were.  For fun today I decided to look that up, and see how my budget measures up.  

I am sure there are a hundred different ways to break this down.  Every "financial expert" has their own opinion.  I just googled it and trusted the first "expert" I found.  It was from CNBC.  It breaks it down like this:

House (mortgage or rent, taxes, insurance):  30%

Transportation (car payment, gas, insurance, maintenance): 18%

Debt: 10%

Food (including toiletries & anything else you use daily): 14%

Household (utilities, cable, internet): 7%

Savings: 10%

Everything else: 11%

Now here's what I actually spend:

House: 29.4% (pretty good, huh?!)

Transportation: 8.3% (we don't have car payments, thank goodness, though we should probably be saving more towards the purchase of a new vehicle should either of ours give out)

Debt: 7.1%  (you would think as much as I complain about paying of debt I could up that to at least the recommended)

Food: 14.1% (pretty close)

Household:  13.1%  (almost double the recommended-- that's something to work on)

Savings: 5.3%  (suck)

Everything else (and here's the bad one): 22.6%!! 

Clearly there is some work to be done here.  I will be reevaluating things to try to get us at least slightly closer to where we should be in some of these categories.  Upping Debt and Savings are the main goals. We'll look at this again at the end of next month and see what we can do.  

By the way, I highly recommend checking out the CNBC link above.  It has a budget calculator so you can put in your monthly income and it tells you exactly how much, according to the aforementioned percentages, you should be spending in each category.  

And with that, happy budgeting.