How does your budget or spending compare?

Do you keep a budget or track your spending?  I track my spending in Quicken and I do a mental budget based on my spending.


Here's an interesting website that allows you to compare your spending to those living near you.  Go to the site, fill in the parameters on the left. Parameters include age range, household status, location, and income. You'll see a listing of what the average household similar to yours spends on various expenses each month.  I changed the month showing because I thought December wasn't accurate (unless you want to know about holiday shopping).  Be sure and drill down on the bubbles to get further information.


Its an interesting experience, but I certainly don't put much reliance on their numbers.  They dont match my spending patterns at all.  Do you know your spending patterns?

Thrifty Habits

Here's an old educational film, "Your Thrift Habits” about money management. Produced in 1948 by Coronet Instructional Films, it’s filled with great advice, and is fun to watch, too. It does remind me a bit of the Andy Griffith Show.

“Your Thrift Habits” highlights some important aspects of budgeting and thrift that are still valid today:

• “If you can do without extravagances, you can save regularly.” In the film, Jack’s budget-breakers are peach super-delights. Your budget-breaker might be Starbucks.
•“Buying cheap, unsatisfactory products is never thrifty.” If you buy TOO cheap of items, they just break and you end up spending the money again.
• Sometimes you’ll have to make choices. In the film Jack chooses to attend a football game instead of sticking to his budget for one week. He actively chose this course of action and accepts the consequences of delayed gratification of his goal. But he got back on track.

In the Film, Jack starts saving for a specific goal: a camera. I find it easier to save when I have a specific goal in mind. In my life now, its easy to want to save because our income is reduced. My vague goal has been save for retirement and kid's education. But why dont people save more when they arent under financial duress?

I think if I had been Jack, I would include a budget item for "Emergencies."



If you like this, you might also like my recent post "Purchase Useless Things."

NOTE: Thanks to the "Get Rich Slowly" blog for bringing this movie to my attention