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View Poll Results: How much is your monthly "allowance" per person per month ?
I / We don't have an allowance 79 66.39%
$1 - $100 / person / month 5 4.20%
$101 - $200 / person / month 10 8.40%
$201 - $300 / person / month 5 4.20%
$301 - $400 / person / month 3 2.52%
$401 - $500 / person / month 4 3.36%
> $501 / person / month 13 10.92%
Voters: 119. You may not vote on this poll

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Poll - Monthly allowance
Old 08-22-2014, 10:42 AM   #1
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Poll - Monthly allowance

Wondering how most people handle "pocket cash" and what expenses are paid from that money.

DH and I get a monthly allowance of $250 each. From there we pay for small items (I recently bought a portable MP3 speaker), booze, cigars (for him), scented dusting powder (for me), lunches / coffee not eaten at home, and the like.

How does your household deal with pocket cash ?
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Old 08-22-2014, 10:53 AM   #2
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Virtually every expense (except Aldi grocery) is paid by credit card.
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Old 08-22-2014, 10:59 AM   #3
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$40/week-person for us. Hard to define what it "covers," just misc, lunch out, little stuff, etc. Whatever we don't use allowance for will show up as personal at month end, so there's no reason to "save" allowance.
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Old 08-22-2014, 11:05 AM   #4
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Originally Posted by tbilltubbs View Post
Virtually every expense (except Aldi grocery) is paid by credit card.
Same here, but when I categorize the CC bill I itemize things that DH buys which are not for "the household" as DH Allowance. Ditto for me. At the end of the month anything that is not spent via CC is given to the person in cash so they can stash it away for future months / larger purchases.
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Old 08-22-2014, 11:29 AM   #5
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Originally Posted by Live And Learn View Post
Wondering how most people handle "pocket cash" and what expenses are paid from that money.

DH and I get a monthly allowance of $250 each. From there we pay for small items (I recently bought a portable MP3 speaker), booze, cigars (for him), scented dusting powder (for me), lunches / coffee not eaten at home, and the like.

How does your household deal with pocket cash ?
I would have bought the portable MP3 speaker and dusting powder from Amazon, and booze and tobacco are not part of my chosen lifestyle. So really, in this post I am comparing apples with oranges.

I am in the fortunate position of not having to answer to anybody (but myself) for how much money I spend on anything. I buy what I want in cash or online. I get cash from the ATM whenever I am running low. Almost all of my cash goes to restaurant bills or the lawn mowing service. Other than that, I averaged $24.56/month in cash spent last year. That included haircuts, stamps, and similar incidentals.

But really, if you average my miscellaneous/hobby/books spending last year including debit card purchases, it comes to quite a bit more.
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Old 08-22-2014, 11:30 AM   #6
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Roughly $45/month for me in my "Free" Quicken category where small personal purchases are entered.
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Old 08-22-2014, 12:01 PM   #7
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We don't have allowances. We buy what we want, when we want. Thankfully, we don't have expensive wants.
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Old 08-22-2014, 12:15 PM   #8
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We don't have allowances. We buy what we want, when we want. Thankfully, we don't have expensive wants.
+1. I don't worry if I go on a little spending spree once in awhile because the rest of the time I spend little.
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Old 08-22-2014, 12:16 PM   #9
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We don't have allowances. We buy what we want, when we want. Thankfully, we don't have expensive wants.
I'm kind of the same way. I don't have a strict "allowance" each month. Some months it will be more and others it will be less.
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Old 08-22-2014, 12:26 PM   #10
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No allowance here either. Never had one in my life. But I have always lived within my means and below my means. I am finding in retirement I am spending much, much less than when I was working. I don't over buy at the stores as I can go every day if I feel like it. Also, for whatever reason, I don't feel the need for retail therapy anymore.
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Old 08-22-2014, 12:28 PM   #11
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We have a $200 allowance each that gets transferred from our joint checking account into our allowance bank accounts.

We started doing this about 3 years ago and the practice has ended our money-related arguments.

DH LOVES to shop. There is something showing up at the doorstep almost every day from Amazon, Daily Steals, etc. His purchases are small, but frequent.

Now that he uses his allowance exclusively for his shopping habit my almost constant annoyance that his spending is out of control is gone. He has to budget his allowance acct and if he runs out of money... oh well!

In the beginning, a couple of times he "accidentally" used the joint account. We had a little talk about trust and magically those accidents stopped.
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Old 08-22-2014, 12:37 PM   #12
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I voted no, because I integrate every purchase into my overall budget. My end of the month calculations tell me whether I have a positive or negative monthly or YTD variance and that guides my discretionary spending for the next month.
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Old 08-22-2014, 12:50 PM   #13
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Two different issues.

Cash spending is categorized by what it is spent on. Up to $10 in a month goes to Miscellaneous ( often this is zero). DH doesn't always get receipts so any amount unaccounted for above $10 in a month is allocated to his spending money category. We don't spend much cash since we use credit cards when we can.

We each get $200 a month for personal spending. This isn't in cash though. It is simply a budget category. The bottom line is that neither of
us has to account for how we spend that money ( usually by credit card though so easy to keep track of). Out of this we fund any personal hobbies ( such as books, computer programs, blog expenses) and each of our respective computers or electronics (iPad, etc).
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Old 08-22-2014, 01:11 PM   #14
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We don't have allowances. We buy what we want, when we want. Thankfully, we don't have expensive wants.
One checking account and likewise DW and I buy what we need. What DW spends usually ends up with the grandkids. Other than that very minimal spending on ourselves.
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Old 08-22-2014, 01:14 PM   #15
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DW has a variable allowance, and because I'm such a good planner it exactly matches her actual spending each month. Same for me.
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Old 08-22-2014, 01:27 PM   #16
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Giving myself an allowance is not a good use of my time.


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Old 08-22-2014, 01:40 PM   #17
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As newlyweds more than 30 years ago, we gave ourselves $300 allowance each a month. The idea was that we could spend it on anything we wanted or save it to buy a big ticket item like a camera or bicycle or business suit or whatever. Personal things like clothes, make-up, hair cuts, manicures, drinking with friends, gifts for friends, hobby costs, personal care products were all supposed to come out of our personal allowances.

Another idea with it was that we would not have a miscellaneous category in our budget since the allowances were supposed to take care of that kind of thing.

It didn't really work out that way. Somehow my spouse was able to spend money and put the expense in the forbidden miscellaneous category. That category grew to be one of the largest in our budget.
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Old 08-22-2014, 01:58 PM   #18
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We tried spending money category a couple times for laughs but it only lasted a week it so each time. Too much accounting work mostly and not effective anyway.

We spend about $2,000 per month (sometimes more never less) for all discretionary including food, gas, entertainment, and all other miscellaneous.
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Old 08-22-2014, 01:59 PM   #19
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I have $60 walking around money per week and do my best to stick to that budget. That covers all my misc. cash spending like lunches, dry cleaning, haircuts, beer etc. I withdraw every Thursday and when it's spent, I'm done spending till the next Thursday.

My wife is more LBYM. She get's by on $30, not including hair. That's a budget line item in itself.
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Old 08-22-2014, 02:05 PM   #20
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lisa99 View Post
We have a $200 allowance each that gets transferred from our joint checking account into our allowance bank accounts.

We started doing this about 3 years ago and the practice has ended our money-related arguments.

DH LOVES to shop. There is something showing up at the doorstep almost every day from Amazon, Daily Steals, etc. His purchases are small, but frequent.

Now that he uses his allowance exclusively for his shopping habit my almost constant annoyance that his spending is out of control is gone. He has t
We started the allowance thing about 3 years ago also. It was part of my ER planning. While we have always LBYM and tracked our expenses for several years I wanted to give the ER budget a true test run. I think the allowance also gives us a sense of individual contributor status to our FI. DH is very proud when he has excess savings and he displays his pride by treating me to dinner with "his money" at my favorite seafood restaurant !
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