Piney Woods Homeschool

Once they turn five, each of my kids begins choosing and helping to prepare one meal each week.  I work closely with each child at first, and gradually I turn over tasks for the child to perform without assistance.  How fast that happens varies from child to child and meal to meal. Five years ago, I blogged about a new way of organizing our meal plannin g.  I was entering the final stages of a complicated pregnancy with a high probability of complications after the birth, and I needed the meal plans to be functional without much help from me each week.  This system, described in that earlier post, worked well for us with few changes for five years.  But this summer I decided we needed to streamline the process more as well as to shake it up a bit since we had gotten into a rut and, although the food choices were repetitive and boring, deciding what to cook each week was too time-consuming for our current schedule. Pockets store cards not in use. I sorte...

When you budget based on your annual income and expenses, using an "envelope system" can work to your advantage. You have probably heard about people putting money into envelopes to put that money aside for different types of expenses. You might have an envelope for clothing or one for groceries, for instance. When a paycheck comes in, certain amounts are allotted to go in each of the envelopes. Then those expenses are paid from that amount. Using a system like this lets you consider your whole year when you budget while still managing your money month by month or paycheck by paycheck. Putting certain amounts of cash into designated envelopes throughout the year allows you to plan for future needs while still meeting your immediate obligations. If you budgeted for annual expenses that are flexible or unscheduled or infrequent (haircuts that are less often than monthly, clothing, gifts, car maintenance, vehicle registration, and other similar types of expenses),...

Why should you base your budget on your annual pay rather than budgeting around each individual paycheck or month? Many expenses are weekly or monthly, and it seems reasonable to manage those based on your individual paychecks or each month. Then for the expenses that are infrequent or not scheduled, you pay out of the surplus of each paycheck or each month's pay. When you do that, it's hard to plan for expenses that come less often but are fully foreseeable. Also, when you budget based on a short period of time, it's hard to save for those expenses that can be expected but can't be known in advance. Examples: Vehicle registration comes only once per year, but you know exactly when to expect it and how much it will cost. This is a fully foreseeable expense that isn't monthly. Christmas and birthday gifts and celebrations each come once per year at times that are known in advance. You get to choose how much you spend on them, but you can plan that...

When you have a realistic list of income and expenses that has income higher than expenses, you next need to allocate that extra income. It's tempting to use that extra money for spending on things you want to do but haven't budgeted for. In a way, that's what we're going to do, but not as free money. You need to have a nest egg, some money put away for emergencies. To start with, you need to get $1000 put away that can be used to cover those totally unexpected expenses like a plumbing repair or bail.  :-) Some of you will say, "That's easy! Already have that!" Those people can read on after this paragraph. Some of you will say, "That's impossible!" No, it's hard but not impossible. It requires you to take every dollar you can scrape together and put it aside in a safe place and not touch it except when you have an actual emergency. It means you have to do without some things you would really like to have. But it *can* be done,...

When you completed Step 5, you had an estimate of your annual income and outflow, how much money you bring in and how much goes back out again. If your income was higher than your estimated spending, things look pretty good. But check your estimates. Did you forget a category? Did you estimate too low?  Did you include expenses you know will occur but not exactly when or for how much, like car repairs (make an estimate for the year, even just a few hundred dollars) or school supplies? If your income was lower than your expenses, that's not surprising. Now we need to fix that! One way to fix that is to look at those discretionary or variable expenses and see if they can be reduced. But don't be unrealistic! You can't budget $20 a year for clothing for a family of 5 unless you are a super thrifty clothes shopper who receives lots of hand-me-downs.  Another way to get your spending in line with your income is to look at some of the bills we listed to see if ...

Now we add up our numbers, all the amounts we put into our flexible categories plus the amounts we previously listed for regular bills and known expenses. Make sure you are adding up numbers for the same time frame! I think it's easiest to do this initially based on annual numbers, so if you have a monthly number, multiply it by 12 first. Weekly numbers get multiplied by 52, etc. If you're using my spreadsheet as a template, the numbers should already have added up automatically.  Now is a good time to check the math and make sure all the numbers are adding correctly.  If they are not, you'll have to troubleshoot the formulas on the spreadsheet. When you have added all of these up, you have a rough idea of your annual spending. How does it compare to the annual income we calculated long, long ago? If your annual spending number is smaller than your annual income, you have a surplus that you can save. If it's bigger than your annual income, you have a def...

We've figured out how much we have coming in, and we've recorded all our regular bills that we're committed to spending. Now sit down and think about what else you spend money on regularly. Just make a list of everything you can think of. Don't include monetary amounts, just the label. - clothes - groceries - eating out - gas - auto repairs - school supplies - Christmas gifts etc. You can see some items on the spreadsheet I showed you , just as examples.  You can add your own in place of mine or in addition to mine, if you're using that spreadsheet. Let's put some numbers into the categories you listed. For some things, you can make a rough estimate. For instance, how often do you fill up your vehicle's tank with gas, in general? How much does that roughly cost? Multiply that out for the year, and put that number down for fuel (or whatever category you are keeping that in). How many people do you buy Christmas presents for?  How mu...