Where our envelopes are sitting

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the way we budget. That was in May, 3 months later and we are still budgeting the same way. Our debt snowball has definitely shrunk as our mortgage and utility bills have ballooned. However, even with that, we are continuing to fund our envelopes. We need those envelopes so that we don’t charge more than we can afford on our credit card.

I love having a surplus in our envelopes each month that we can carry over to the next month or until it’s needed. Here are the numbers we were thinking about “maxing” each envelope out to:

Car Repair: $2500

Essentials: $300

Hair: $300

Clothes: $500 (still toying around with this number… clothes and shoes can get expensive!)

School: $300 - $400

Kid’s Activities: $500 (I waiver a lot on this category, too, because our kids’ activities can get really expensive.)

After much consideration, I still think these are great goals to shoot for except for the school envelope. I’m going to raise the goal for that to be $500. Over the summer, some of our envelopes actually hit these targets, but then money was spent from them so they aren’t that high anymore. (But isn’t that what the envelopes are for? To spend?) It was definitely nice having the money when we needed it; especially when it came to our clothes and school envelopes. The back-to-school grind is no joke!

So where do the envelopes actually stand? Let’s take a look.

            Car Repair: $955

            Essentials: -$126

            Hair: $230

            Clothes: $160

            School: $83

            Kid’s Activities: $388

Now let’s break all the numbers down and see what they really mean for our budget, shall we?

Car repair… Our car repair envelope really took a beating over the summer. We got oil changes for two cars and on my car we got my tires rotated and some (super expensive for what it was) sensor replaced. We also took from this envelope to pay our kids (plus 2 more) for some work they did when we were moving in. It wasn’t the smartest move we ever made, but the extra help moving was well worth it in our opinion.  We have been slowly contributing to this envelope to try to grow it. Also, now that our summer vacation road trip is over, all leftover gas money at the end of a pay period will be going into our car repair fund until we reach $2500. Yesterday, I was able to add $95 from leftover gas money and we are hoping we can add even more going forward. $2500 here we come!

Essentials… Clearly we need to budget more money towards this every month since we are in the negatives! Generally, we put $100 a month into this envelope, I’m thinking we need to up it to $200 at least. The only plus side of this is we shouldn’t need to buy much out of this category for a while. I recently bought toilet paper, dish washing detergent, laundry detergent, razors, body wash, and shampoo and conditioner for the kids. I’m sure there will be stuff we need, but I’m hoping it won’t be anything too expensive or that’s needed too urgently.

Hair… Our hair care envelope it doing okay. It’s currently sitting at $230 but that is after paying the remainder of the cost for The Girl’s highlights (she had a giftc ard from her birthday) and having The Boy’s hair cut for back to school. We only need $70 to top that envelope off, but we didn’t budget any money for it in August so it will be a goal for September. (Maybe October if we decide not to fund envelopes in September because of No Spend September… more on that later.)

Clothes… The fact that envelope still has $160 in it even after back to school shopping makes me so happy. We spent $250 on shoes alone, plus even more money on first day of school outfits and The Boy is playing football for the first time so he needed some workout specific clothes… and we still have $160 in there! However, cold weather is on its way so we will be needing to buy pants and long sleeves for the kids before too long. We will continue to fund this envelope, shooting for that $500 target.

School… Wow did this envelope save my bacon when it came to back-to-school shopping! I had to buy school supplies for 2 kids plus my own classroom and… drumroll please… there was enough money!!! However, we had over our “max” in the envelope. The envelope had $530 in it, so I guess, like I said earlier, I will max it out at $500. Even after shopping, we had some money left in the envelope so that when the kids actually started school we still had money left over for all the necessary first week of school things: donations for Science class, cost of the agenda, etc. (And we still have a little bit of money in there if needed until we can get it built back up!)

Kid’s Activities… We didn’t have to spend too much from this envelope over summer, but now that their activities have started back up, this envelope is going to get used. The Boy’s football is paid for, but The Girl’s dance has a lot of upcoming expenses: costumes, comp fees, shoes, and the like. We will be using this envelope, in conjunction with a separate account, to pay for these things as they come, but it certainly makes it difficult to grow too much of a cushion.