Now that we are expecting, our budget needs to change. Not too much thankfully but taking away some of the extras and adding them to savings so we can be totally prepared. My goal is to have 1000 dollars in savings by the time the baby gets here. It shouldn’t bee too hard, 500 of it is coming from our tax return, maybe more but definitely 500 minimum. We will open a savings account with that 500 and then edit Joseph’s direct deposit to automatically add 50.00 from each weekly paycheck to go directly into savings.

We are also saving up all of Josephs vacation days for when the baby comes and reducing our ‘eating out’ budget. I have been using Mvelopes Personal for over a year now and it is still working for us. The first image shows our envelope balance as of today, normally savings would be higher but this weekend we paid 1/2 down on a new living room set and will pay the other 1/2 with tax return next week.

The second image, the bar, shows our trend of cash flow, we are spending $497 LESS than our income. so at the end of every month there is an average of 497 left over and divided between several envelopes (savings, car, clothing, maintenance, etc.) I got those figures by running a cash flow report by month in Mvelopes.

Once we get the 2700 back from taxes (should be about 6-15 days via direct deposit) we will add at least 500 in savings, pay off the living room set, get a lawnmower, brakes replaced and reset up our fish tank. With all of that I think we will still have at least 500 dollars to add into savings, but we will see how much everything costs. Savings is the number one priority now though.

If you use MVelopes and figure out how to make a circle graph with any of the reports let me know, I cant seem to get one right.