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Last night, I set about the task of eliminating or reducing expenses. Each trip to the store, phone call or web visit took just a few minutes, and resulted in some pretty decent savings.  By the way, when I use the word savings, I use it in its loosest form.  I’m not only referring to […]

It’s confession time.  For the past six months, I’ve been coasting.  After more than a decade of focusing on our personal finances, I took the gas of the pedal and relaxed a bit.  I spent rather freely, wandered away from our budget, and stopped writing.  It was fun (sorta), but the time has come to […]

My wife and I are working to pay off our fixed-rate, conventional, fifteen-year mortgage. Our goal is to eliminate our mortgage debt in less than 10 years.  We purchased our home in February of 2010 – so we have a little over four years to reach our goal.  (Realistically, it looks like it might take […]

I recently wrote about our debt reduction process – a simple one-page guide to getting out of debt.

Step 2 of our process was:

We created (and followed) a zero-based budget. We “spent” our paychecks, on paper, at the beginning of each month, so that we would know where our money was going to go.

I thought I would elaborate a bit on our budgeting process – and some tips that work for us.

We break our budget into three major categories: spending, saving and giving.

Within those categories, we try our best to estimate upcoming monthly expenses.  We save for annual expenses (such as insurance premiums) and quarterly expenses (such as our car insurance premiums).