

flexible split in my expenses, it doesn't matter.

Related > The Balanced Money Formula: Should you let it get out of balance? I love the balanced money formula, but when I apply it to my own life, I get stuck on figuring out what's a need versus a want. Yes, we need that stuff, but it's not money that has to be spent in a specific place, on a specific day. That includes groceries and gas, not just fun stuff like birthday gifts and dinners out. What remains, whether we like it our not, is our flexible expense budget: the money we use to pay for everything that isn't committed to a regularly scheduled bill. Happily, that number was smaller than the number of dollars we earn each week. My husband plugged all these numbers into a huge spreadsheet that eventually spit out a number: the number of dollars we needed to budget every week to pay our fixed expenses and meet our savings goals. For the first time, we went past the monthly stuff and tallied in the quarterly and annual fixed expenses those budget-busting surprises that are actually regularly scheduled expenses, like annual insurance premiums and the excise tax for our car. We sat down one night with all our financial records for the past year and worked out what our fixed expenses are: our mortgage, our utility bills, our debt payments.

Then we did something we really should have done years ago. We went ahead and set up a new checking account at the local branch of Citizens Bank, but we also opened our ING checking account. We could use one account for our day-to-day flexible expenses like grocery shopping, and another to pay our fixed bills, like the mortgage and utilities. And it has - beautifully - for the past three months. Related > Which Online High-Yield Savings Account & Money Market Account is Best? ING Direct, where we already had a high-interest savings account.Citizens Bank, which has a local branch where I can deposit the cash and many small checks I receive in the course of running my business, or.Having flexible spending can help reduce your stress because you never know when you're going to get hit by flexible expenses.Ī few months ago, my local bank and I had a falling out and my husband and I were suddenly very motivated to switch banks.
