re: How do you and your SO budget?

quote:

---

What do yall consider needs/bills? Do vehicles count or is that a personal thing? What about furniture and stuff? I could see a female saying a blah blah sofa being necessary and the man not agreeing, or likewise an f250 necessary when the wife doesn't care about vehicles.

---

We consider a bill something that is either a utility or something that we pay every month that is approx the same every month. For us, that is the following:

Mortgage
Natural Gas
Electric
Solar Lease (the house came with it)
Water/Sewer
Auto insurance
School Tuition/ Before and After Care
Daughter's dancing classes
Life Insurance
Student Loan
Cell Phone
TV/Internet
Lawn Care
Alarm Monitoring
Christmas Club (int rate sucks, but our CU offers it, and it's an easy way to save for Christmas - we are actually getting our check tomorrow!! )

We also generally take a vacation once a year either a cruise or an all-inclusive package somewhere, so we will make a payment on that each month and we consider that a bill.

We put a pretty significant amount of money in "savings" each paycheck. (outside of retirement accounts). Basically, we use our "savings" for large one-time expenses. This includes things like auto and home repairs, trips, etc)

We have two paid off vehicles, but we are probably going to replace one in the next 18 months. (hopefully we can go a lot longer, but time is catching up on us). When that time comes, we will probably take some money out of our savings account to make a sizeable down payment and will then have a note, which will become a bill.

Neither one of us are big car people, we just need something to get us from one place to another.

Oh, furniture: we just replaced a bunch of it when we bought our new house earlier this year, so we should hopefully be good for a while. We paid cash. My wife does have a Rooms To Go card with no balance on it, that if we ever needed to buy new furniture, we could use that and get the no interest for so many months, and treat it as a bill.