We decided to setup a budget based on my income alone and use her paychecks to build up a savings account for when the baby comes. Not exactly the traditional plan according to Dave. I was struggling with this approach because I felt like we should follow the plan if we were going to commit to this. On the way home one night I was listening to Dave's radio show when a listener called in to ask if they should build up a larger emergency fund before beginning to pay down their debt. In her case told her no, but he said if you thought job loss was imminent or were going to be having a baby in a couple months, then yes, it's alright to shuffle the order a little. So that was it, we went forward with our plan.
It was tough putting together our first budget. We used the budget tool on the http://mytotalmoneymakeover.com site. It was a huge help. I won't bore you with the details of our budget process but I did learn a couple interesting things as a result:
- We spend an obscene amount of money on childcare. For what we pay for 2 kids, 2 days per week we could buy a second home...
- Whatever you think you need for groceries in a month is too little.
- This was a biggie for both of us - While the budget did put limitations on what we were able to spend, this structure was actually helpful for two reasons. 1.) It put a limit on how long we had to wait for something, if the money was gone we knew we could get it next month. 2.) It took the guilt out of spending money. As long as we stayed within the guidelines of the budget we didn't have to feel bad about what we were spending because we knew it was properly accounted for.
