It's Alive! My Dynamic Budget

In accordance with my new task list, I spent a couple of hours the other night revamping the budget. I haven't done this in a while, so it was overdue. As our life changes, our cash flow has to change as well. So I logged into Quicken and went over our income and expenses.

One of my favorite features of Quicken is the budget calculator. It allows you to categorize every expense and determine the average over the last year. By looking at the averages, I can see where we needed to tweak and where I need to spend better.

The big changes I made were:

• increased my husband's income from his last raise a few months ago (I told you the budget was out of date)
• increased our gas budget to $400/mo - previously $300
• increased my pt job income to $630/mo as I plan to pick up another day each week
• changed our car insurance to add the second car

After much back-and-forth, I decided to keep Netflix in the entertainment budget. We haven't been using it all that much recently, but my husband is traveling for 5 out of the next 6 weeks and I think I'm going to want some entertainment. Other than that, I made a few small tweaks and now it looks good to go!