Okay, Richard Jenkins said his percentages might not work for everybody. Plus I didn't organize my list very well. Mortgage and car note belong under the debt column.
Retirement funds I don't have a choice about. 7.5% of my gross paycheck goes to LASERs, which will hopefully pay me a damn good percentage of my final salary when I retire. Every state worker pays into that. 2.0% is already going into Deferred Compensation to buy stocks, so I'm already not depending on it. I might as well add the .5% to make those amounts an even 10%. I don't want to freeze payments because I'm 30 and I already can't afford inflation. And I come from a line of long-lived with lots of health problems people. I need the compound interest.
I can't do anything about taxes or my insurance premiums, and not paying them isn't an option. I can use the Flexible Spending Account to at least pay for medical expenses with pre-tax dollars, but that is also unchangeable until May.
In fact, every category I feel I have control over what I spend I don't have any money to spend in it.
Maybe I should go for the accounting degree. Because the numbers just aren't making sense with the math skills I've got. On one level they do, expenses exceed income, equals me living paycheck to paycheck. It's when I ask "how do I make the numbers meet?" that my brain can only answer "Gee, George, I don't know. Math is hard."
Things start to go wonky at the mortgage. By changing the percentages to 10%, 5%, 5%, and 80%, I can pay all reoccurring monthly expenses, the mortgage and the car note before running out of cash. But that only leaves the 5% fun money to buy groceries and run the house on.
I've tried deprivation. I resent it and to rebel against the resentment, I blow a wad of cash on stuff exactly when I don't need to blow a wad of cash. I work hard for this money that doesn't go very far and I want to do fun things with it. I have to budget it in or I have another budget explosion.
I need savings because I have nothing to fall back on in an emergency, except making a loan and that never helps financial matters.
So let me get the latest expenses breakdown out of Quicken, because I doubt that part of my figures is even close to reality.
And I have options. I just haven't wrapped my head enough around the figures to figure out which option is the best.
Read Free!
The BookWorm
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