Hello hello everyone! This is my first blog since Josh and I announced that we are pregnant with our second baby!! 🙂 We couldn’t be happier and Avery is so excited to soon have a little brother or sister! I am only 7 weeks but we got a little excited to tell people haha. With a new baby comes lots of costs! Even if we have another girl there will still be purchases to be made and everyone knows babies aren’t cheap. Josh and I always budget but now more than ever are very careful with our money so that we can afford all that comes with having another baby in the house. So I thought I would walk you guys through our budgeting a little bit that way maybe you could get ideas for budgeting for your family. At the end of every month I take all our receipts and make sure they line up with what our credit card statements say and then input all our expenses and money coming in into an excel sheet. That way we can easily see how much we spend and how much money we make each month and each year. But to help us stay on track during the month we use the app called You Need A Budget and it works well for us. When we first started it I made categories based on what we spend our money on (car insurance, bills, groceries, household items, gas, hair cuts, tithing, eating out, Netflix, stuff that came up that we forgot to budget for and fun money). I included the stuff that comes up category because there always seems to be something such as birthdays, ordering a bunch of air filters for the house, the crazy high cost of dentist appointments and etc. This category has helped us because with budgeting it into the money we make it’s set aside if anything comes up and if nothing does it goes into our savings account. Car insurance and all of our bills don’t really fluctuate that much besides one bill going up and one bill going down and vise versa in the different seasons so it’s normally always on spot of what I budgeted for. One thing that is optional in Washington but not here in Tennessee is air conditioning! It’s worth the extra cost because in the summer months the southern heat can be powerful! For our groceries we budget around $250 every 2 weeks. For a family of 3 that may seem high but we really enjoy baking and getting all organic produce. This plus getting snacks that Josh can enjoy on his days off are worth the cost for us and we always make sure whatever we get stays in that budget we have set. Our next category I made was household things. This is paper towels, toilet paper, shower stuff, cleaning supplies, toothpaste, toothbrush heads, hair stuff when we run out, soap, etc. Since we don’t need those things every single month this isn’t a huge category money wise. Gas for our car is obviously one that is needed. We fill up once a week on the weekend and even though it doesn’t get to empty in a week we like always having it full before Josh starts his work week. Hair cuts are another one that we use every month because Josh’s hair grows crazy fast! He gets his hair cut once every 4 weeks and since mine is a lot easier I try to only get it cut once every season. Tithing is something we pay at the beginning of the month because we want to. We know our money isn’t ours it’s God’s so we always make sure that some of our money each month is serving him. Eating out isn’t a big category because we try not to go out a lot. Not because we don’t like to (because we really love to!) but because we can’t afford going crazy. We limit ourselves to going out to eat once a month. Netflix is a pretty small cost but it’s worth it for our family because Avery’s favorite shows are often only on Netflix so it’s a no brainer for us. And last but not least our fun money category. This is in our budget to actually prevent ourselves from going crazy and buying things we want. Since all of our birthdays just passed we took this money out of our budget this month and put it into our savings because it wasn’t necessary after getting birthday presents. Josh and I always make sure we are in agreement with whatever we spend our money on because even though Josh makes the majority of our income we are equals and we always want to make sure we are being smart with our purchases. We’ve found that it’s more exciting long term to put money into our savings rather than spend the extra right away. I am happy to have found a husband that is amazing with money and that has helped me be a lot better at budgeting and actually enjoying it. I hope a look into how we budget gives some people ideas on how to budget even better and if you guys have any other advice for us we would love to hear it!