Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about what to do with your bonus check.  Being fiscally responsible is something that is very important to me as is preparing for the future while still enjoying the present.  Darren and I have big goals for the future and the only way we are going to achieve them is by being disciplined in how we spend and save our money.  I will be the first to admit living and working in Manhattan as a single successful woman, I had a lot of disposable income given my responsibilities were few and far between.  Darren also loves to tease me that I had it easy because for every date I went on the guy always paid.  I know, I was very fortunate and that isn’t the norm. 

Things change though when you get married and buy a house.  At one time we  only had ourselves to worry about but now we have each other, our home, our cars and some day a family to consider.   To be sure we are being smart about our spending, we recently sat down with our accountant to see if we were handling our finances correctly and sought some advice on the kind of investments we should be making.   I was really pleased to hear we were being smart about things and that made us both feel good.  

One of the key things our accountant commended us for was setting a budget and sticking to it.  We recently uploaded Quicken to my new iMac and transferred all our financial information into it.  We looked at our spending for 2007 and used that as our starting point for setting our 2008 budget.  It is really interesting to see where we spend our money and how much it costs to run our home.  Quicken allows us to track our income vs. expenses, our spending vs. our budget and a variety of other comparisons.  

In order to be sure we were saving money each month, we factored in a montly savings amount into our budget.  By doing this, we are guaranteed to set money aside each month for savings.  And, if after all our expenses are paid we still have some extra funds we can either add that to our savings as well or we can splurge a little for some extra special things.   We purposely built in some shopping and special spending into our budget so we don’t feel like we are depriving ourselves of luxuries but we are doing it in moderation and that is my recommendation to everyone.  

Make a budget and stick to it.  You will be happy you did.  My philospophy has always been to live and spend within your means, save some and spend some.  In the end, you can’t take it with you.