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I know the target demographic here is the younger single person without much income, but as an guy in his 30's with a decent job and a family I wanted to share something I do that has made budgeting easier. I call it the 10% 'Misc' category. 10% of your take home income should be thrown into a miscellaneous category. My Miscellaneous category is designed to cover unscheduled expenditures that don't make sense to budget for. Hair cuts, new clothes auto maintenance, household expenses, doctor copays, fun money, whatever. You can't budget everything, life is fluid and things change. Many budgets here don't take into account things like new clothes, or auto maintenance, prescription drugs if you get sick. Sure a short term budget can ignore those things but eventually you'll need new tires for your car, or a new pair of shoes. Budgeting for these expenses can also get tedious. Do you really want to waste time figuring out you have to save exactly $43.23 cents a month to afford a new set of tires in 2 years? I simplified my budget quite a bit by having the 10% misc category. I basically budget my monthly fixed expenditures like mortgage/cars/insurance/electric, give ourselves a budget for groceries and misc, and whatever s left over either gets spent or saved. You can scale the 10% back to 5 or 15 or whatever works for your family or situation, it also scales as you earn more which your expenses tend to do. I guess what I'm getting at is I've seen some crazy detailed budgets here in BFC, and the world doesn't always align with the spreadsheet. Give yourself some flexibility. For example, last month I had my transmission serviced in my car. It was 200 bucks, so it came out of my miscellaneous category.
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May 14, 2013 17:49
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:48 |
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There's no hard and fast rule when it comes to cars. I've seen young high earning men spend over 40% of their take home to have an insanely expensive vehicle. Some folks look at vehicles as tools to move them from point A to B and don't care much about them aside from their functionality. You earn enough you can pretty much buy whatever you want. What do you want from a vehicle? I foolishly spend about 15% of our take home on vehicles. We both drive really nice newer Ford's so nothing super fancy but it sucks making those kinds of car payments. I'll be keeping my car a long time after it's paid off, and we'll probably lease something less expensive for my wife next time, or at least wait for a better lease deal to turn up.
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Jul 8, 2013 17:13
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Dantu posted:This is probably a very basic accounting question, but here it goes. I'm using an Excel spreadsheet to track my budget. I've started using two of my credit cards to churn points in certain categories. I was paying the cards off almost weekly through my bank but it was making me confused about where to track the money. Am I better off just paying the credit cards on the due date, for whatever the statement balance is and tracking the purchases under the category as I spend? Seems like if I do it right, my gas + groceries for one month should equal my Amex bill the next month? The only thing I've noticed regarding using credit cards like this, is most cards update your credit report when your statement is cut. If you care about your credit score and are trying to keep it as high as possible your utilization could get out of whack. For example if you spend 3K a month on a 5K limit card and wait for your statement to cut, the CC company will report your balance as 3K on your credit report showing 60% utilization. It doesn't matter if you pay it off completely as they probably won't update your report again until your next statement is cut. Ideally you want utilization below 25% or so. If you're talking about putting 2K on a 10K card though, that won't make a big difference. I personally pay my card about a week before the next statement is cut so the reported balance to the credit reporting companies is low or zero.
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Jul 29, 2013 19:27
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I'm guess you are living by yourself in a high cost of living area if you're dropping a net paycheck on housing every month. The budget is a start, and I'm a big fan of the Misc. category but I still think you're missing some things. Mostly things that come with starting your own household. Household items and furnishings add up quickly. Your electric/water bill budgeted amount is very low, as is your grocery. It's doable, but you're probably underestimating it a bit. The electric should be upped to at least 100 probably. I think you might be overestimating your tax burden though. A quick scrap sheet of paper calculation should put your taxable income around 54K with a fed tax bill in the ballpark of 10K a year. ( I assumed no other deductions other than standard single). No idea on your state tax situation. You'll be fine, but I don't think you're accounting for everything. Grab a credit card that ties into whatever hotel chain you'll be staying at and put your trips and discretionary spending on it. It'll save you quite a bit in free hotel rooms and whatnot. The Marriott Rewards card is pretty nice.
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Sep 19, 2013 18:45
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You guys are ridiculous. Celot has no debt at all, is saving 1600 to 2000 dollars a month and you guys want to discuss 80 dollars a month on a weightlifting coach? Who gives a crap? He can afford it. That's his hobby. There's people in here that spend more than that on their cats every month (myself included). Some people spend twice that on coffee every month or Pokemon or Wonderhangers, whatever. Celot, Regarding buying a house, renting is not 'throwing money away', renting is keeping your options open. If you know for a stone cold fact you're never leaving the area for 10 years go ahead and buy. I won't do the entire writeup of how much money you 'throw away' buying a house but it's not insignificant. By renting you have options, you can leave when your lease it up, if Oil activity around OK slows down and you need to get to Eagle Ford or the Dakotas for work, you just end your lease and move on, you don't have to worry about selling a house. It's a mobile workforce these days and tying yourself down to a piece of property doesn't make much sense.
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Dec 9, 2013 22:00
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Personally I find it too tedious to try to budget every little thing. Is it really worth my time to figure out how much to budget for a 'haircuts' line item? No. I do have a family of 4 now though. What works for us is a general MISC. category that is 10% of our monthly take home. That covers all the miscellaneous irregular expenditures. Haircuts, copays, oil changes, a trip to Lowes for lawn fertilizer, whatever. It works for us. If at the end of the month there are unused MISC funds we can roll them over, or put them to use somewhere else. Some months we use all of it, some months we don't. The biggest thing I see people forget are things like -auto maintenance -clothing (this is a big one) -personal care (contact lenses, doctor visits, haircuts) Look at this table. It's from the IRS considers to be 'National Standards' of basic living expenses and is used when people file Bankruptcy. If your budget is not somewhere in the close ballpark of this, you should re-evaluate it. code:
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Feb 26, 2014 19:23
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packsmack posted:I'm trying to come up with a minimum amount of salary that I will need to live comfortably. I've never had a set in stone budget. I've also never had to try and negotiate a wage from an employer, so all new experiences up in here. Right now I have a few main categories: In addition to medical, you need some kind of budget for personal stuff. People always forget to budget for things like haircuts, clothing, a new pair of shoes, stuff like that. Especially starting a career. A career wardrobe can cost a lot of money to put together. I find a generic 10% of my take home pay 'flex' category works for things like that. YMMV with that though.
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Oct 2, 2014 20:23
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:48 |
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Spikes32 posted:So I don't need help creating a budget so much as advice for how much of my income is reasonable to spend on a new car. I've only had a beater that was given to me three years ago, and it may die in the next six months to a year. I make ~50k pre tax and pay 9k a year in rent, and have no debt to my name (college graduate, two years into my career). I want to start aggressively putting money into my 401k/roth but don't want to just buy a total clunker. What is a reasonable amount of money to budget for/how much of a down-payment should I want to put down? Assuming your credit is very good/excellent money right now is dirt cheap to borrow on vehicles. My credit union is offering 1.65% vehicle loans. This goes against the grain of most BFC advice, but don't put anything down. If you can get a sub 3% interest rate on your car note, your money can be better used other places. Usually I recommend people at least put tax, title, license, and fees down and only finance the actual cost of the car, but money is stupid cheap right now. In another thread I posted this skipdogg posted:Assuming you take a 21K loan @ 1.9% for 60 months, you will pay $1029.90 in interest over the life of that loan Pay an extra 1000 dollars in interest over 5 years, so your money can go work for you in the market and earn you over 10,000 dollars over that same 5 year period. As for how much to spend on a car, I don't know your budget, but I would try to keep my vehicle expenses at 15% or less of my take home pay. Assuming you don't drive much that should be a doable number for a late model car and insurance premiums. Gas and maintenance might stretch that to 20%.
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Oct 6, 2014 18:03
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