Tracking Money

I have been keeping track of my spending since I was an adolescent. If I look at my old notebooks, I will see big, bubbly script stating how much I had saved towards a goal. My budgeting during college got a tad more complicated, but it was still on paper. Then, I moved to using the computer—a word document, and finally I’ve gotten onto Excel. The only formula I use, though is the “Sum” function.

I like my budget setup overall, but I still get a little mixed up at times when tracking money. For example, at times my husband and I don’t have enough money in a particular account, so I borrow it from aonther one of our accounts. I transfer the funds. If I do this once and write myself a note, I am good. I will likely remember to pay it back. However, if I have a few reasons for making transfers, I get mixed up and then I have no idea if I put all the money in the right place.

For example, we recently bought a $4K couch and chair. We had about 2K in our Home Improvements fund, so I transferred that to the checking account. I took about 1K out of the Life Happens fund, but that’s all that was there, so I borrowed/took 1K out of the Emergency fund. I wouldn’t usually count a couch and chair as an emergency, but one of our couches has a black hole in it—it dips close to the ground—and another has a rip. Plus, we finally got to the furniture store to pick something out. When the motivation is there, sometimes we’ve got to jump on it. Plus, we had surpassed our minimum of 3 months for our Emergency fund, so I knew we had the money.

(One reason we didn’t discipline ourselves to just spend the 2K that was in our Home Improvement fund is that we’ve bought inexpensive furniture in the past and broken it quickly. We wanted to purchase more sturdy furniture so we wouldn’t have to replace it in a year or two. Now, if we had to finance new furniture, we would have looked for something that was less expensive.)

If this were the only purchase /payment we were working on, it’d be easy enough. Next month, I could repay the Emergency fund with Life Happens money. Unfortunately, life “happens” quite a bit in our home. We just finished paying 6+K for our doggy’s cancer treatment. It looks like I took about $300 out of our Life Happens account in March and $400 the previous September. I could look up what we were paying for, but at this moment, I’m not sure.

Well, if life happens so much, why don’t we put more into this account each month? In 2024, we put $200 into our Life Happens account a month. At the end of 2024, I added up our spending and saw we spent about $400 a month for surprises that came up. I considered putting the full $400 a month into the budget, but we were over budget in other areas too. I put us at $300 a month for life happens and figured we’d face the issues when they came up. So here we are, facing those issues.

So, transfers and borrowing from other accounts mixes me up. Many of our accounts are “sinking funds” and I’m not always sure how to account for those. For example, do I count they $100 I put into the house fund as spent when I put it into that account or do I wait until I spend the money on paint or new blinds or calk to count it? I’d like to keep track of how much I spend on paint or blinds or calk, but I don’t want to count the $100 as being spent twice.

I am finally ready to learn more about accounting so that keeping track of our money is easier. I want to be able to easily report how much we’ve earned and spent even when we have numerous accounts and categories with which we organize our money. 

So, I am trying to determine what I want to do to learn more about budgeting. Do I take a college-level class at my commmunty college? I probably don’t need to know that much about accounting. Should I watch some YouTube videos? Should I look for an online class from a personal finance podcaster? I’m not sure. I need to research to see what is out there and to see if it fits my needs. I don’t need a college degree in accounting, but I need more of an understanding than I have now. 

Peace Out (and In),

Julie