Welcome to Money Mondays!

(If you are not reading this post at www.howisavemoney.net or in your feed reader, it may have been stolen from my site.)

I used to post my financial inflows and outflows on Fridays in the past but I decided to move this to Mondays instead. Normally I go grocery shopping on Sundays after church. Now I will post the last week’s worth of financial inflows and outflows on Monday so that I can include the weekend spending as well.

This week my financial outflows were:

$116.25 for my internet and cable bill. I’m trying to figure out why the bill is $3 more than last month since everything is still the same. My bill should have already stabilized since I have been here past one billing cycle.

I will have to take a look at last month’s bill to see where that came from. It is a small amount but if the bill continues to fluctuate every month then it can add up over time.

$52.77 on a mix of food and non-food items. I recently revamped my budget to group food and household items together. It was really stressful to separate food from household items and I was inevitably going over one category and under the other every month.

Recently I decided it was not worth it to separate the two. It also became a hassle since I bought both categories from Walmart. I would either have to do two transactions, a split bill with subtotal, or manually separate in Mint.

I do have a separate $50 dining out budget for when I order food. This does not happen often so I will track that separately. Everything else will get lumped together from milk to shoes!

We get our second paycheck for the month on Friday. This will be a great cash inflow for the month. I have been able to set my budget where my expenses total half a month’s paycheck.

We get paid every other week and the revamped budget has my paycheck being able to cover double my expenses for the month. This is great because I will be able to save the three paychecks necessary for the summer when I will not be getting paid.