So, you always hear that you need a budget to be effective, right? You need to track your money to get control of it so you can plan to spend it the best way so that it doesn't end up just leaving you going to many unknown places.
This is the section where I want to focus on doing a budget update once a month to show you how I'm doing and how I'm growing. I think that showing people that it can be done on a normal income is a huge motivator and will hopefully encourage others to start their own financial journey.
We follow a simple program for money management that includes 7 Baby Steps. Here they are:
Updated 8/30/16: Currently, we are working on Baby Step 3: Saving 3-6 Months of Expenses In Savings again. We actually have 96.5% of this funded at this time. It takes some time to get the money together, but we are working hard and should be able to complete this in a couple months!
We have been following these Baby Steps since May 24, 2011 and have seen great success. Our net worth has gone from actually being negative to growing more and more positive each month.
I am basically looking to list out our income and our main expenses. I am also going to update with our Net Worth report and will show how we grow it every month. I think that by doing this it will hold me accountable and will show how it's grown in real time.
Past Monthly Net Worth Updates
June 2016 – $89,579.39 – Net Worth Update (+$5,287.17)
3 months of updates here. We have grown quite a bit over the last 3 months with stocks rallying and our cash reserves building. See how it went down in this update!
March 2016 – $84,292.22 – Net Worth Update (+14,825.89)
So, what has been happening since August 2015? A LOT! In this time, we have purchased a vehicle, sold our other vehicle, received an inheritance, started funding our retirement much more, started putting money that we’ve saved into our sinking fund towards our vacation, among other things.
August 2015 – $69,466 – Net Worth Update (+$357.96)
We finally finished up our 6 month emergency fund this month. Stocks put a damper on our growth, but we ended up positive over the month.
July 2015 – $69,108 – Net Worth Update (+$2,316.50)
An awesome month for sure as we grew our emergency fund savings a lot this month. See how we did it in this update.
June 2015 – $66,792 – Net Worth Update (+$888.00)
We got a good chunk of money put away into savings this month getting us much closer to our Fully Funded Emergency Fund of 6 months! We also moved our investments around and ended up taking a hit on that getting things started up after rolling over a 401k into an IRA.
May 2015 – $65,904 – Net Worth Update (-$510.00)
Alright, here goes! My first real Budget Report/Net Worth Update!What HappenedThis month was a pretty good month overall, but I think with how the paychecks fell at the end of the month, our stats were showing a little skewed. We will see next month anyways. We got a good chunk of money put away into savings this month getting us all that much closer to our Fully Funded Emergency Fund of 6 months of expenses! Can’t wait to get that done so that we can start investing, saving for kid’s college and paying off the mortgage!Net Worth – May 2015AssetsHome […]
April 2015 – A Post About Net Worth
So, lately I’ve been very interested in reading and writing about raising our net worth. Since we just finished our 9 week class that we facilitated for the first time in our home called “Financial Peace University”. We have been following the Baby Steps that FPU teaches since 2011 and have since been able to pay off all of our debt other than our personal residence, replace our cars by paying cash, create a monthly budget that we follow, build up an emergency fund that is at this time 70% funded towards our goal of $15,000, and lastly, we’ve been […]
Are you ready to finally take control of your finances? Let my budgeting spreadsheets help!
Just fill out the form below and I'll send you the link to get the same exact budgeting spreadsheets that I use each month!
Included in the workbook:
- Monthly budget form
- Breakdown of savings form (for your sinking funds)
- Overview of your financial plan
I've been using these same forms since August 2011 and have grown my family's net worth 500% tracking our money using these forms!
I love this ‘accountability’ testimony for other families to watch.
Thanks! Yes, I need to get back to updating it more frequently. But, it is nice to track and show that I’m “walking the walk”.
I LOVE the graph. How great that you have data from the past 8 years! Seeing your progress motivates me… I want us to have a similar trend.
Thanks! Yeah it’s awesome although I wish I had journaled my way through us getting out of debt while we were doing it so I could have captured the emotions we went through! Since we became debt free (other than the house) in 2013, it’s hard to go back to how it felt at that time other than knowing it wasn’t as free as now and that I don’t want to go back!