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.