[mrpoptart]

Building a personal budgeting system that reduces the complexity of the process to paying attention to 1 number and about 5 minutes per week to be sure you're on budget all the time. I came up with a solution to this problem about 5 years ago and have been testing iterations with friends and family. In process of building an app to manage it for me.

[peter303]

I got budgeting down to two numbers: Total take-home pay past 12 months vs total expenditures past two months. Try to avoid the latter going over 85%.

[mrpoptart]

It's awesome that you have a budget, and a process for doing it. Would you find it useful to know whether or not you can afford something you're about to buy, be it a taco, a couch or a car? Your budget works well in as a reflection process, my budget gives you the constant knowledge of how you're doing right now and how you'll probably be doing in the future.

[peter303]

I use a spreadsheet with rows bulk spending categories and columns months, plus a few summary columns. More than 15 years ago it was just a table on graph paper. I know within a few dollars how much I have earned spent in the past 12 months. The 'budget' is awareness of such spending and trying to keep not much more than the previous year. Stuff happens like a dead car, hospital stay, job change etc. so its not always firm.