It is once again time to start thinking about what we plan on doing for the upcoming year. I am not making ‘new’ resolutions because I still have a few that I need to work on from this year. What I do plan on doing is committing to having a 12 month rolling budget.
I started the rolling budget a few months ago and then I decided to abandon it for various reasons. These included things like an income change and also a change in my fixed expenses. This time around I plan on using the rolling budget technique to get a clearer picture of my income and expenses for a full 12 month period.
img. from rte.ie
It will be interesting to track all of my income and expenses for the year of 2014 and then see what happens. I will continue to use Mint because that is the easiest method of tracking for me. I will set every category in my budget to roll over to the next month. The process is actually quite simple:
-Set budget categories in Mint at the beginning of the year
-Set categories to roll over every month
That is all!!!
Every month the balance in each category will roll over so if I set $50 for gas but only spend $40 in January then $10 will roll over to February and I will have $60 in February.
If I set $100 for food but end up overspending and use $120 in January then I will only have $80 in February because of the overage rolling over from the previous month.
So far I have been pretty good about staying in every budget category so this should be easy to do for the entire year. This method of budgeting is similar to the paper envelope system because if you put the budgeted amount in the envelope every month but don’t use it then you have extra for the following month.
Wish me luck as I attempt to do this and NOT reset things if I have a bad month!
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