Tyler read the numbers off the bills and I typed them into the sheet. That was our whole Sunday night last weekend: him at one end of the kitchen table with a shoebox of envelopes, me at the other end with the laptop, and Moose snoring underneath with his chin on my foot.
We've always had a budget, sort of. It lived in my head and on the paper calendar on the fridge where I write the due dates. In January we decided we want to buy a house by the end of 2026, and a budget in my head was not going to get us there. So this is the first one with every number written down, and I promised myself I'd share it the way it really is, not the way I wish it looked.
What comes in
I'm a pharmacy technician at $17.50 an hour, about 28 hours a week, and I take home about $1,700 a month after my health insurance comes out. Tyler is a maintenance technician at a manufacturing plant in the area and takes home about $2,950 in a normal month after his 401(k), insurance and taxes, more when there's overtime. Together that's about $4,650. I'm using the normal-month number on purpose. Overtime is nice, but nobody promises it.
What goes out
Here is February, line by line:
| Line | Per month |
|---|---|
| Rent | $725 |
| Electric (average) | $135 |
| Water, sewer and trash | $68 |
| Internet | $65 |
| Phones, two lines | $128 |
| Groceries | $600 |
| Gas for the truck and the CR-V | $260 |
| Car insurance | $142 |
| Renters insurance | $14 |
| My student loan | $112 |
| CR-V payment | $289 |
| Credit card minimum | $66 |
| Moose | $45 |
| Subscriptions | $61 |
| Gifts and fun | $150 |
| Total | $2,860 |
A few notes so the table makes sense. The electric line is an average. Our side of the duplex is all-electric, heat pump and water heater and stove, so the bill swings a lot. The one in Tyler's shoebox that night was $229, for January. Summer runs around $190, spring and fall are cheap, and $135 is roughly what the whole year works out to per month.
Water, sewer and trash come on one city bill. Gas covers Tyler's drive to the plant and mine across town, plus a trip to Columbia now and then. Moose's $45 is mostly a big bag of dog food and his flea and heartworm pills. He's a 70-pound hound, and he does not eat like a small dog, no matter how small he acts when he wants your sandwich.
What it showed us right away
The bills with names add up to $2,860. Take that away from $4,650 and you get $1,790 a month. On paper, that's money for the house fund.
Tyler looked at that number for a long time and then said, "So where did January's go?" Fair question. We had not put anything close to $1,790 into savings in January. So we pulled up the checking account and went through January one charge at a time.
It wasn't one big thing. It was Walmart trips that started as milk and ended at $70 with a bath mat. Casey's pizza on the Fridays I worked late. Work boots for Tyler, $119. Two birthday presents, a haircut, a copay, a part for the truck, a tank of gas to go see his mom in Kirksville. Every one of those made sense at the time. None of them had a line, so none of them counted until we added them up, and together they ate most of the gap.
The next thing we noticed was which lines we could change. The CR-V payment ends in March, and we agreed before we even finished the table that the $289 goes straight to the house fund starting in April. The credit card has $2,140 on it that's been sitting there since our wedding in 2021, and the $66 minimum mostly pays interest. That has to go first. Phones at $128 for two lines look big to me, though I don't know yet what to do about it. And groceries, at $600, is the biggest line we have real control over.
The last thing was the electric bill. I can't do much about $229 in the middle of winter except wear a sweatshirt. But seeing a $135 average next to a winter bill almost $100 higher told me those cold months need a little cushion of their own.
What we're doing in March
No new rules yet. For March, every dollar that leaves checking gets a line in the sheet, even a $3 coffee. At the end of the month we'll see what "everything else" really costs, and then we'll give it its own number so it stops sneaking up on the house fund.
The jar on the counter stays, too. Every loose coin and every $5 bill still goes in. It won't buy a house on its own, but every time we walk past it, it reminds us what the sheet is for.
