Deciding to transform your finances is a huge step, and it can be an intimidating task at first. One thing that has helped us immensely during our journey is our monthly budget meeting.

We follow our budget and track our expenses throughout the month, but we also set aside one specific day where we do a financial deep-dive.

If you don’t do something similar to this, here’s what we do at our budget meeting each month:

What we use for our budget meeting:

• We each grab our computers and pull up the budgeting spreadsheet we have stored in our Google Drive. By keeping it stored online, we can both edit the spreadsheet on separate computers and see what each person is updating.
• We also log in to all of the online portals for our monthly bill accounts in order to make sure that their information matches what we’ve actually been charged for that month.
• Snacks almost always make an appearance.

1.) Update budget tracker with:

• Actual money spent
• Actual income received
• Credit score changes
• Investment balances
• Remaining debt balances

2.) Decide what to do with any leftover money:

• We decide how month money we’ll put towards paying off our remaining debt or what we’ll put into our savings account.

3.) Prepare for the upcoming month:

• We look closely at our spending averages and adjust our budget (as needed) for the upcoming month. We believe that budgets are meant to be fluid enough to change as you need them to. The point of a budget isn’t to lock you into only spending a certain amount, they are meant to help you give your money some directions.
• We discuss any upcoming expenses that aren’t already accounted for in our monthly budget. There are times where we’ll have one-off expenses (scheduled car maintenance, trips, events, etc.) and we simply add those expenses to our spreadsheet for the upcoming month.
• We go into our Goodbudget app and update our digital envelopes if any of the numbers for our variable expenses have changed. Once we’ve made our adjustments we refill the envelopes.
• Transferring the 1st half of the next month’s budgeted expenses is the last step. We keep a one month cushion in the checking account that our monthly expenses are paid out of.

4.) Hugs & cheers:

• Celebrate our small wins. Whether we paid off another debt, added X amount to our savings account or simply stayed under budget in all of our categories – no “win” is too small to celebrate.
• If you end up having a rough month, be glad that you are at least aware of the things you need to change for the upcoming month.

That’s it! We make it a point to always do our budget meeting each month because it really helps us stay on track. Ours is set in our calendars as a recurring event as well!

Do you ever set aside time to look at your budget each month? What do you do at your budget meeting?

$tay Wealthy Friends,

— Dannie