On May 15, 2009, at 5:55 PM, stingom wrote: > For the first time since I've actually cared about where our money > went (yes, there was a time, long, long ago that I didn't budget...) > my husband has taken a position that pays him every other week. I get > paid the 15th and 30th. My income on the 30th is not enough to cover > our 1st of the month expenses, so we need his income at the end of the > previous month to get everything paid. I'm struggling with how to set > up the spending plan, becasue it only has 1st half and 2nd half > options. In the spending plan, it looks like I'm fine, but if I spend > everything that's there on the 29th (as the theory is with zero based > budgeting) and my paycheck comes in on the 30th, and then our > payments start auto-drafting for the mortgage/rent, etc., we'd be > overdrawn. What I've been doing isn't working (just leaving the "left > over" from the 15th in the account...in theory we should have a nice > chunk of change to put on debt/in savings, but I leave it in there and > it just seems to get "sucked up" by non-essential stuff...to be > honest, I know it's there, so I don't budget as closely as I should.) > If I don't leave it there, though, I'd be overdrawn on the 1st. Any > suggestions for how to handle this, both mentally and technically on > the program??
Hi Shanna, Be careful with the term "zero-based budgeting" because it doesn't mean that you should spend all that you have in your checking account but rather move it to savings so you don't have cash sitting around that you could spend arbitrarily. In MoneyWell, the concept is to allocate all your income to buckets so you have nothing left in your checking account. If you plan your spending and set allocate your income as it comes in, it shouldn't matter if you get paid weekly, monthly, semi-monthly, or biweekly. If you put the money left over from the 15th paycheck in to buckets and only spend what you have put in your buckets, then you should have money for savings/debt reduction. Of course, you need to include an amount monthly for your Savings and Debt Reduction buckets and allocate money to those or that won't work either. In fact, if you have no emergency fund in savings, you need to make your Savings bucket a high priority allocation until you get a couple of thousand dollars in there. The hardest part about envelope budgeting is looking at what's left in the buckets before you actually spend money. You can plan and allocate religiously but if you ignore the final step of spending only what you have allocated, then the whole process falls apart. Let me know if this helps at all. Peace, Kevin Hoctor [email protected] No Thirst Software LLC http://nothirst.com http://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
