Poll - Monthly allowance

[Live And Learn]

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 ?

 

[tbilltubbs]

Virtually every expense (except Aldi grocery) is paid by credit card.

 

[Midpack]

$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.

 

[Live And Learn]

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.

 

[W2R]

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.

 

[Animorph]

Roughly $45/month for me in my "Free" Quicken category where small personal purchases are entered.

 

[FIREd]

We don't have allowances. We buy what we want, when we want. Thankfully, we don't have expensive wants.

 

[scrabbler1]

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.

 

[David1961]

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.

 

[WhoDaresWins]

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.

 

[Lisa99]

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.

 

[Meadbh]

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.

 

[Katsmeow]

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).

 

[foxfirev5]

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.

 

[MichaelB]

DW has a variable allowance, and because I'm such a good planner it exactly matches her actual spending each month. Same for me.

 

[dallas27]

Giving myself an allowance is not a good use of my time.


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[LOL!]

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.

 

[RetireAge50]

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.

 

[Secondact]

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.

 

[Live And Learn]

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 !

 

[Dog]

DH gets $200 cash every payday (gets paid every two weeks). He uses this for incidentals and to save for cash expenses during his 2x/year golf trips to AZ. He retires in 2016 and we will revisit allowances then.

 

[Katsmeow]

One problem I had with the poll part is that I see an "allowance" and cash spending as too separate things.

That is, cash is a method of spending, but isn't the category.

It is unclear in the poll if you are asking how much "cash" each can spend each month or if you are asking more how much each can spend each month that doesn't have to be accounted for.

We spend very little cash, but each gets $200 in the spending money category (most of which is spent by credit card).

To us, this avoids any arguments or even discussion. So, if DH wants to [-]waste[/-] spend $50 on something that I think is useless, I don't really care since it comes out of his spending money. And, vice versa of course.

 

[Walt34]

DW has a variable allowance, and because I'm such a good planner it exactly matches her actual spending each month. Same for me.

That's the way it works here too. We don't have a set amount to spend on irregular stuff like the small size graphic tablet I bought last month for the laptop, but that's something I won't be replacing anytime soon either. We have a budget of course but it isn't cast in stone. If we spend over this month we'll spend less the next.

But we are making a conscious effort to minimize the amount of "stuff" we buy since we're going to be moving in the next five to eight years.

 

[audreyh1]

Hmmm. We don't have a cash allowance.

 

[Sue J]

DH gets $80/mo in pocket cash, I get $50/mo. I spend very little of mine, DH can rarely make it into the 3rd week and still have more than a few bucks left. He spends his on Ebay or at thrift stores for crap like old radios, clocks, amplifiers, turntables, sometimes books and records. If he's out late on a thrift store run he may use it to pick up something to eat.

We have a budget category for things like clothing, haircuts, gifts, etc so it's not for things like that. It's just for his personal need to pick up old used stuff that other people don't want in their houses and he wants in his. Many times he has to buy parts for these old things and he fixes them with the intention of selling them on ebay or a garage sale. But mostly they sit in our house in an extra bedroom or the attic.

Before DH retired he used to use household money for his crap collecting "hobby". He was easily oblivious to how much he was spending using the debit card, but it was beyond reasonable. When he retired he agreed to limit it. So he still gets to do the thing he likes to do, he just has to keep it reasonable. I couldn't spend $80 if I tried, so $50 is fine for me.

I use mine for going out to lunch with my sister or a friend or for minor expenses that are mine and not for the household. Most months I still have $35 or more left at the end of the month and I accumulate the excess in a cash stash and save up for something USEFUL and NEW like the iPad mini I bought last year. I'd much rather have the cash or an occasional shiny new toy than piles of other people's discards.