Budgeting

My newfound hobby: Budgeting

At first I dreaded it.  There was just too much to account for, especially with two people with multiple bank accounts and credit cards.  But, since high school, I was so curious to know how and where my money went in, out or stayed.  I didn't want any mere estimates or generalizations -- I wanted to know where each penny was going, to the T.

These were my attempts in the past
- In high school, I carried around a notepad and tried writing down the spendings on a notebook and punch them into a calculator.  I even would carefully select and purchase a cute Korean money spending tracker notepad.  That seemed to help a bit, but all I can tell you was that the record keeping didn't last more than a month.
- In college, I used Minted.  But some of the spendings would be placed in the wrong categories causing me to spend more time editing and carefully looking through if things were categorized correctly.  That lasted longer, but not much--maybe two, three months?
- This past year, I tried YNTB, but it was just basically an excel sheet with a few fancy buttons.  It was an application that I definitely could have done myself with a computer excel sheet.  Thus, waste of subscription money.

So, I took it into my very own hands since this past January and started with the technological basics: the excel sheet.  It was just me, my laptop, excel, simple formulas and perusing of hundreds of bank statements.  It was difficult to face the numbers for a long while because we had to fly to California so often and Alex was the breadwinner on a resident salary (I was waiting for my optometric license to get in)--all I could tell you was that we were in the red for a long long time.  Once I got the grasp of how much we were making together and how much we were spending, I found myself writing furiously in notebooks and extrapolating figures during my work breaks, then updating it onto my laptop as soon as I came home.  I was checking out finance books from the library and reading about them online.  I'll admit, I was late in the growing-up game with this whole finance thing, but everything was finally making sense.  Also, I remember thinking to myself, 'Man, I used to be one of those kids who used to scoff at the boring adults reading through dense boring money books, and here I am, at 29 years old, hungrily going through personal finance articles.'

Now, I absolutely LOVE punching in the numbers, extrapolating, and determining out how much we spend on what, how much we can save, where we can save, what goes into taxes, how much is needed to buy a car, house and much much more! I would put in every single spending (name, date, category, cost) and color code them, pie chart and compare each month.  I even calculated how much I spend on skin care and make up every year (less than $700) and graphed the utility bills to see how much electricity or water bill goes up per season.

In the end, it led me and Alex to proudly pay off all the student loans last week!

Weeeee!  I can't wait for the new year :)