I tried replying to Amber's comment last week but my internet was playing up so much the comments wouldn't post. Anyway, we have no problem with managing our bills, it's more when we were overspending we were dipping into the bills money. Now that we've put the spending money and the bills money into separate bank accounts it's been much easier and we've had less problems.

The next thing to try and manage is our weekly spending money. While we've been having heaps of fun by going out lots, we keep on overspending and as a result spend less on groceries (because there's not that much left) and/or add to the credit cards.

Example: this weekend just gone we added $56.34 to my credit card for some of the groceries (after I repaid $68 on this card so I really wasn't thrilled). Then we were left with $70 cash for the rest of the groceries. So far $20 of that has been spent and we are left with $50. It should be ok. I've certainly had to be creative with what I buy for us, which has been fun! The downside of it though is that we end up lacking in the non-essentials for a while, so we are constantly missing stuff. Each week I try to be more aware though, and hopefully we can do better next weekend.

On the upside though we got dressed up for B's work do, went out for breakfast once and dinner twice and got takeaway once. It's fun, but that's where our money is going!

So I'm planning this weekend to be a bit more mindful of what is being spent, hopefully that will make a big difference.

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In other big news we booked the travel for our next holiday. We are traveling by boat to Tasmania with another couple who are very good friends and taking the motorbikes and will do a 7 day ride around Tasmania. We are so excited, it will be great.
The boat fares up and back are $1000 so the plan is to buy Christmas presents with December's pay and to give the money for the fares from January's pay.

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Another exciting development is I had my last physio session during the week!! No more paying $105 per visit, no more tiny lunch breaks on those appointment days and I slowly get to wean myself off the early morning rehab exercises. As of this week I do four mornings with a day off during the middle of the week. (On this day instead I attend to little financial things that need doing eg paying bills, updating spreadsheets etc - I've really missed having this time because it's so hard to do after work).
I was ecstatic and absolutely over the moon on Tuesday when I got told no more appointments are needed!!

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That is all for now, hoping you all have a lovely weekend!!

I have so many financial things to write about I could blog daily for a month but free time is minimal (especially leading up to Christmas) so I'll just stick to one of our larger financial matters.

Probably one of the biggest things we've been dealing with lately is adjusting to both being paid monthly on the same day and re-tweaking the budget. In DH's last job he got paid monthly at the end of the month while I get paid monthly in the middle of the month. It kind of meant that we could set aside an amount for bills and withdraw weekly our spending money without worrying if we had overspent really because there was always another pay coming in in the next fortnight.

Then when he changed jobs in May the payday changed to the middle of the month. It was fine in the beginning because we had a little bit of extra money to fall back on, and then I had the broken collarbone so we weren't really overspending because we weren't going out much and we knew what we had was going to doctors and hospitals etc.

By August and September though the extra money had been spent and we were starting to go out more so we actually started running out of money because the buffer we had got used up. In the month of September we actually ran out of money within the first two weeks so the remaining two weeks were not fun at all! It was then that I decided that our current budgeting system had to be tweaked especially as it looked like we were going to run short in our bills account which is a big no-no for me.

We have two bank accounts that barely get used so I decided that we would have the set monthly amount for mortgage and bills left in the bills account and whatever money is left over to be spent on things we both agree on, repaid on credit cards if needed and the remaining money to be divided by four or five weeks (whichever is relevant for that month) and transferred into one of the bank accounts we don't use. The other bank account we don't use is now used as a holding account for short term purchases we want to make (example: the month of October we put $1000 in for our Perth spending money and $400 for the back tyre we were replacing on the Harley).

This updated method has definitely reduced my stress levels as I know what we can spend weekly and there's less likelihood of running out of money. Because we overspent for a few months the credit cards also have balances which we are repaying but I am saving that for another post.