Weekly Budget Check

It's time for our first weekly budget check. Instead of checking my Mint account every day, I've decided to check it on a weekly basis on Fridays to see how things are looking so that I'm not obsessing over it. I also receive a weekly summary that shows me an update on all my accounts which is nice.

So far, things are looking good. We're already 1/3 into January and we haven't gone over any budgets yet. The good thing is, all of our budgets are fixed amounts each and every month (mortgage, utilities, loans, etc) with the exception of two. The only two that are not fixed budgets are our miscellaneous budget ($545) and grocery budget ($500). I guess our grocery budget can be considered a fixed budget now since we're doing the cash envelope method.  We still have $490 in our grocery budget. Time to go shopping soon.

Our Monthly Budget in Mint

To save additional money on our groceries, I signed up for an account at Coupons.com. Haven't used any coupons yet but it seems pretty easy. After logging in to your account, you can start "clipping" coupons and print them to bring in to the market. It also has a cool meter that shows you the total available savings  on the entire site along with your clipped coupons savings.

Clipped Coupons

Available Savings vs. Your Clipped Savings

I am getting a little worried about our miscellaneous budget. We have $322 left to spend for the month. This Saturday, my wife and her older sister is throwing a baby sprinkle for their oldest sister. This is going to cost our miscellaneous budget approximately $200 right there leaving us with $122. Mind you that we use our miscellaneous budget for gasoline for our cars. Luckily, my wife's commute is a total of 1.5 miles. Mine on the other hand, is about 40-50 miles on average depending on the routes that I take.

Well, I guess we just have to take it day by day and really manage our miscellaneous spending to stay within our budget.

Until the next weekly budget check...