| Me and spouse are lucky enough to earn a decent living. Without that this method wouldn't work. We also use multiple checking accounts from a credit union that doesn't charge insane fees. We keep track of our monthly recurrent bills. We limit this increase as much as we can. This all comes out of a special checking account. Beginning of month we transfer bills to this from savings. Currently about 40 percent of our income goes to this. Entire paychecks go into "savings". This is used to transfer to other "budgets". Also each paycheck has certain HSA, and retirement savings deductions withdrawn. We don't pay attention to this. We each have our own debit card that we "pay" ourselves with. This is approximately 10 percent of our income. We use this for expenses such as eating out, hobbies, small individual expenses that we don't want to justify to each other. The remaining money we have an agreement that we must discuss any decisions with each other before using. There are problems with this method, and sometimes we cheat, or use credit cards. But we have long term goals and love each other and strict money management isn't as important as having a happy relationship without having to constantly worry. |