The Weekly Budget

My wife and I tried to manage our money for many years without much success. After everyones opinion and every app on the market, we decided they are all terrible fits for us personally. Every dollar by Ramsey? Nope... Too much budgeting. Mint? Nope, too historical. There has to be a way that both my wife and I can look and see real-time what we have to spend. Enter the weekly budget.

Let's Get Budgeting!

Your first year doing a weekly budget should be for learning about your expenses and your income. Make sure that you log all of those recurring expenses, memberships, fixed costs like rent or mortgage, etc...

How You Start

Calculate your weekly budget below. After you do that then create a spreadsheet on Google that will allow you and your partner to see and edit data at the same time. Log every expense and every week add your weekly budget to the sheet. Keep a running balance so you know how much money you have to spend that week.

Simple Weekly Budgets: Yearly Salary

Paid a salary for your job? This section is for you! In order to find out what your weekly budget is we multiple the take home pay times the number of paychecks you receive in a year. Then we divide that number by 52 to get our weekly budget. Here’s an example:

Take Home Pay Per Check: $2,000 Checks Per Year: 26 (paid every two weeks) Yearly Take Home: $2,000 x 26 = $52,000 Weekly Budget: $52,000 / 52 = $1,000

Simple Weekly Budgets: Not Salary

If you are not paid on a set salary, then calculating your weekly budget depends on how often you get paid. If you are someone who gets paid on a weekly basis, then you can just use your income as your weekly budget. If you are paid on a bi-weekly basis, just divide your take home pay by 2 and use that as your budget. Always get paid prior to adding the money to your budget.

Build Savings With A Savings Goal

Set a Weekly budget goal to save to. My wife and I have a goal of $1,000 that we want our weekly budget to get to. It may take a few weeks to get there, or even months, but if our weekly budget balance is above $1,000 then instead of adding our weekly income to the budget, we put it into savings, invest it, or use that money to pay down debt faster.

Fixed Costs

There is a way to make this even better, but it takes a while to save up enough to start doing this method. You should have a minimum of 2 months of income saved before starting this method. I recommend a year of the simple all income / 52 and then removing all expenses first. Then after that look at your recurring expenses throughout the year. For example: electricity, mortgage, natural gas, insurance, memberships.

Let's say we had this setup: Take Home Pay Per Check: $2,000 Checks Per Year: 26 (paid every two weeks) Yearly Take Home: $2,000 x 26 = $52,000 Yearly Expenses: $14,000 (mortgage, netflix, amazon prime, cell phone, car insurance, electricity, gas, etc...) Weekly Budget: ($52,000 - $20,000) / 52 = $615

This means that you have $615 that you can spend each and every week and still make your bills meet. You don't have to worry about taking out your zoo membership, your mortgage or rent out anymore. As your fixed costs change, you will have to recalculate your weekly budget to ensure that it is accurate.

How Does The Weekly Budget Solve Problems?

OK, so now that we have our weekly income figured out it is time to start using it! Let's say that your weekly budget is $1,000. You have to have the money in your bank account in order to start using it. I recommend saving up 2 paychecks worth at a minimum before you start the weekly budget. That way you won't have an unexpected expense that will wipe out your budget. With the simplified version of the weekly budget, you will log all expenses, even recurring ones, and take that away from your weekly budget.

1) It Becomes A Game - Reward Yourself

When you have a weekly budget and you don't spend every penny, it becomes fun to see how much money you can save without feeling as though you are living underneath your means. My wife and I wanted to take a vacation to the beach, so we wanted to see how fast we could save to afford the vacation. We wanted to spend a week there, so all we had to do was save up enough for the place and then keep our spending within our weekly budget after that. We were able to save up in 3 weeks to afford everything. We did this by implementing a no spend week. The no spend week means we spend nothing unless it is necessary. By giving yourself a reward for saving, you have a much higher chance of making it.

2) Buckets And Categories Should Be Historical

The greatest thing about the weekly budget is the fact that you don't have to track how much money you have in each bucket or category. Want to put $100 in savings per paycheck? Remove that from your weekly budget calculations and do that from the start. Use an app like Mint to keep track of where your money is going by category. I like doing this so that I can show my wife where our money went. We to see where our money is being utilized so that we can refine those categories and prevent overspending.

3) You Are Managing Your Money

You are telling your money what you want to do with it and where you want it to go. Take control of your money and your future. You don't want to be a victim of "I don't make a lot of money so I can't save". That's absolutely not true. My wife and I started off well below poverty and we fell for that line ourselves. I wish we had not, but it started us out in a big hole. My goal is to completely remove our debt burden by the time we have been married 10 years and we are almost there. We have paid off massive amounts of debt by using the weekly budget and have had more vacations and more spendding money in our pockets since we started. Why? Because we are managing our money and it isn't managing us anymore.

4) Simplifies Life

My wife and I have a joint banking account. She is a full-time mom and I work a full-time job. Since we got married we started with a joint account. It is so freeing knowing that both my wife and I know at any second of the day exactly how much we have to spend for that day / week. We use an app that I custom made for us to keep track, but a Google Spreadsheet works just fine.