Work is a little out of hand this week, but needs to be done! I’m enjoying my Truth or Consequences apartment very much, especially the comfy bed in a dark and quiet room, as well as the kitchen. The weather has been beautiful, but I haven’t gotten out at all except to the grocery store across the street. This is simply not a tourism stop.
On top of my regular workload, I have to do all the bookkeeping to close April and start May. It’s especially important for me to keep on top of the budget when I have expenses straddling two months and I’m not entering transactions daily. I’ve gotten used to dealing with the three different currencies, but the addition of US cash is giving me a little more work. I may change my mind and just go back to using the credit card for everything and entering estimated totals until the transactions are posted to my account.
I came in right on budget for April, with about 30CAD to spare! This is a far cry from my last couple of months in Mexico where I usually ended with several hundred dollars to spare, but considering all the extra expenses I had this past month (not counting the truck, which came in within its own budget), I’m just glad to still be in the black!
I should perhaps point out that this is not the balance in my chequing account. I use a zero-sum budgeting approach where my budget resets to zero every month, I can only spend the money I earned for that month, and anything not spent at the end goes into the emergency fund. So this means is that I didn’t have to dip into the emergency fund this month and I put $30 into it. Every little bit helps. 🙂
I do something similar. At the end of the month I add whatever cash I am carrying (cash account) to the balance of my chequing account and then transfer that balance to my savings account. This leaves a balance of zero in my chequing account just before my Union pension cheque is deposited at one second after midnight on the first of the month. I then move the amount of cash I just moved (on paper) from my chequing account back into my cash account. Works for me and it keeps expenses coming out of the correct month’s money.
It does sound similar. The key thing to making my budget work for me is that I never spend a future month’s income early. Most of the time, that’s not an issue, but I have the odd early payment that comes in. Mid-April, I got about $400 from a client that I wasn’t expecting till a full month later! I spent the rest of the money pretending it wasn’t there even though I could have really used it! But if I had done that, I would have been $400-minus whatever I spent in April, short in my May budget, kind of like if I had taken out a payday loan. It’s easier in the long run to just tighten up the purse strings in a month that is threatening to come up short.
I never physically zero out my accounts, but rather track all my different buckets with my software. I have been using a really great app called You Need a Budget for two years now and it has changed my life. It’s not just a place to enter in transactions, but rather a place where I can forecast, track my various buckets, and actually get ahead. It’s a whole philosophy of budgeting that works really well for me since my income and expenses are so erratic.
Yes, very similar. My concern was taking cash out in one month but not spending it until the next month. Early on I was actually walking around broke for a few days at the end of the month just so I did not carry cash from one month to the next ;). It was a trial and error process but I finally have a system that works for me.
I don’t have that problem with YNAB. It doesn’t care where your money is physically. If I have cash leftover at the end of the month, it’s counted as money I didn’t spend that month and rolls over into the next month’s budget or into my buffer (emergency fund), whichever I prefer.