Archive for the ‘budget’ Category

Does a windfall cause you to overspend?

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Do you lose track of "un-budgeted" income? Sometimes our plans for extra money don't add up. When we anticipate a tax refund or a stimulus rebate or a job bonus or other side income, we start to spend it before it actually arrives - and many times the math does ...

Mrs. Rocket on groceries

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Mrs. Rocket has posted here before and I am trying to convince her to guest post on Rocket Finance at least once a week. I think it would be great for this blog if we heard from her regularly. (Yes, it has taken me almost a year to figure this ...

How do you deal with a budget deficit?

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Earlier this week I shared that I use Excel for our family budget. In the spreadsheet I have set the formula in one particular cell to show our average monthly surplus or deficit as we move through the year. Since we are currently making a fairly large rent payment in ...

I am a spreadsheet budgeter

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

I first started tracking our family budget in 2005. Some of you will remember that our budget deficit that year was in the neighborhood of $25,000. I had taken a class in Microsoft Excel and decided to start plugging our numbers into a spreadsheet and see what happened. I continue ...

I thought I had a 3/4″ wood bit

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

I have shared on numerous occasions that we put our family at financial risk with bad money decisions early in our marriage. As we start to pack for our upcoming cross-country move, I was reminded of another habit of mine that has cost us a lot of money over the ...

Time the market? I use timing to pay my bills

Monday, February 11th, 2008

At our house, we try to make extra money wherever we can. Bank bonuses and credit card bonuses made us almost $3,000 last year. A much riskier strategy, credit card arbitrage, made us another thousand dollars. I admit that making money this way is not for everyone. I don't plan ...

We are heading in the right direction (I think)

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

So, I was looking through my Excel budgeting workbook the other night. . . (I know, I know, there are better ways of keeping track of one's finances, but I like tinkering in Excel, plus it makes it easy to set the budget for the next year, just copy, paste ...