twaddle
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2006
- Messages
- 1,703
Here's an extremely basic finance question that baffles me.
Each year I'll take a look at our expenses and establish a budget for the next year. The problem is that we don't really enforce it. If I see expenses that are way out of bound one month, I'll squawk about it, but there's no easy way to "penalize" ourselves for that excess in some future month and get back on budget.
I pay regular bills via online banking, so most of the cash flow is pretty centralized, and I can dump a fixed amount of cash in the bill-paying account each month, but that doesn't help.
Both DW and I have multiple credit cards with absurd limits, and we use them for almost all of our purchases, so I don't really see an effective way to enforce a monthly or even annual budget.
Maybe limit ourselves to one credit card each with a credit limit of budget/2?
How do you enforce a budget?
Each year I'll take a look at our expenses and establish a budget for the next year. The problem is that we don't really enforce it. If I see expenses that are way out of bound one month, I'll squawk about it, but there's no easy way to "penalize" ourselves for that excess in some future month and get back on budget.
I pay regular bills via online banking, so most of the cash flow is pretty centralized, and I can dump a fixed amount of cash in the bill-paying account each month, but that doesn't help.
Both DW and I have multiple credit cards with absurd limits, and we use them for almost all of our purchases, so I don't really see an effective way to enforce a monthly or even annual budget.
Maybe limit ourselves to one credit card each with a credit limit of budget/2?
How do you enforce a budget?