Hellobee Boards

@Hypatia: ours looks pretty off. We definitely don't give 10-15% of our income (do people do that??) ...childcare for us is like 35% for 2 kids. Tens of thousands a year for nanny and Forest school, it's shocking.

Yep. I checked out budget app and ours fits pretty closely in this. No debt and I sah mostly so very little childcare. We aren't hard core Dave Ramsey people but we did use his principles some when we were first married and paying off debt/getting a budget set up.

Yeah, we have a childcare category that takes up a fair chunk, although not near as much these days as when our kids were younger and we had a full time nanny + part time preschool. The rest of the categories are flexible. I don't see a vacation category (maybe that goes in personal?). I don't have a separate category for "insurance". In my mind, home insurance and utilities are included in my housing category; auto insurance is included in my transport category, health insurance is included in my health expenses category. Our housing is low--probably 15%, but we put a lot extra into it, so not sure if that would count towards savings or not. And our savings is also not just "savings"--we have it further split into retirement funds, actual cash savings, additional house payments, additional non-retirement investments, my pension fund ( we just bought some extra years last year to make up for my switch from 1 state to another).

We actually don't budget, so I can't say how much we spend on food exactly (groceries that aren't personal care items + eating out/delivery + random trips into convenience stores or coffee places+ amazon prime/pantry) but one of these days I want to sit down with my husband and add it all together so we have an idea. The problem is, we'd have to sit down with all our credit cards and debit card accounts at once, since we're always rotating cards for different promotions and between the 2 of us, we probably have 6 different cards in use at any time. And where do kids' activities go? Personal? As our kiddos get older, we have more activities that suck up our money--dance, camps, soccer, even things like teacher gifts and class events and fundraisers. It really adds up.

I read Refinery29 budget diaries all the time, and one day I want to do one for myself, just so I can see exactly what we're doing--but I'd rather track for a whole month, not just 1 week.

Ours is pretty similar to the chart assuming this is net of taxes. There are a few categories that we spend less on (insurance and giving mainly) and we spend about 10% on childcare.

This budget breakdown is spot on for us, after taxes and insurance. The insurance category could be re-named "childcare and kid expenses" and it would almost be our exact budget, lol.

Our student loans used to be about 25% but now they're down to about 7%.

@anagram: if you want to work on designing a budget/tracking at the same time, check out goodbudget. It has very good analytics but you manually enter everything yourself. I can easily see a break down of how much we are spending on any given category for a month, or a year, where, how, what cards, etc. You can also install the app on multiple devices and have you and your husband both input expenses easily.

@Anagram: yeah, I know the risk, I just believe knowing about all the minutiae of my money is more important than the risk. I have a credit freeze with all 3 bureaus and I've had multiple layers of credit monitoring for the past 10 or so years (bc of hacks --> free credit monitoring and most CCs monitoring the score for free now). Also, since I check Mint daily, I see all of my transactions daily, and could catch a fraudulent transaction right away. Here's to hoping for the best!!

*This also makes me think the one extra thing I could do is at least unlink our 2 savings accounts from Mint, since we don't spend money directly from those accounts.

ha! No.... Childcare is our biggest spend currently, and has been for the last 4 years or so.

And food would probably be a higher percentage than what is shown.