Gathering your real numbers, not made-up ones
Okay. Last time I told you about the checkbook that didn't match and the legal pad that fixed it. Tonight we're doing the legal pad part. Yours, not mine.
I want to say something first, though, because I see the look on some of your faces already. You're thinking about the class budget worksheet you maybe did once at a bank, the one with "Sample Income: $4,200" already filled in. Forget that thing. We are not doing a pretend budget with pretend numbers tonight. We're doing YOUR numbers, the real ones, sitting right there in your bank account and your bills. A fake budget teaches you nothing because you can't get a fake number wrong. Real numbers are the only ones that count.
So here's what we're gathering, and here's how.
Step one: the money coming in
Get your actual take-home pay. Not what you wish you made, not the number before taxes, the number that lands in your account. If you get paid every two weeks, that's important to know now, because it changes some months into three-paycheck months and that trips people up later if they don't plan for it.
Here's my opinion on this part, and I'll say it plain: round your income down. If you're not sure whether a bonus or overtime is going to show up, don't count it yet. If you're wrong, be wrong in the direction where you end up with extra instead of short. Nobody has ever gotten hurt by underestimating what they'll bring in.
Step two: the bills that don't move
Pull up the last two or three months of statements. Mortgage or rent, utilities, insurance, car payment, whatever's fixed. Write every single one down with the actual amount, not a guess.
And the opposite rule applies here from the income rule. Round these UP. If your power bill runs somewhere between $95 and $130 depending on the month, don't write $95 because that's the good month. Write $130. Same logic as before, just flipped — you want to be wrong in the safe direction on both ends.
If you're up here in American Fork and you moved from somewhere with softer water, take a hard look at your water bill and if you've got a softener, the salt too. I had to rebuild our whole budget when we moved here because those numbers were just different than what I was used to, and I about had a heart attack the first time I saw what the water softener salt was running us at Costco. Not because it's crazy expensive. Just because it was a NEW line I hadn't accounted for, and new lines are exactly the kind of thing that makes a budget not match reality.
Step three: the leaky stuff
This is the one people fudge, and it's the one that matters most. Groceries. Eating out. The "quick stop for milk." I've told people before I tracked this for three months once just to prove a point to myself, and it came out to about forty dollars a trip once you're standing at the register, every single time. That's not a guess, that's from the pad.
For tonight, just get an honest number for the last month. Add up every grocery receipt, every fast food stop, every DoorDash thing, all of it. Don't judge it yet. Just find it.
Step four: check for double charges
While you've got the statements out — and this'll take you an extra ten minutes, but do it — scan for anything charged twice. A copay, a subscription you forgot you had, a gym membership from three moves ago. People let these go because it's twelve bucks and who's got time to fight over twelve bucks. But twelve dollars here and twelve dollars there adds up faster than the fun money ever does, and it's the easiest money in your whole budget to get back because it's just a phone call.
Rodney and I did try a whole year of basically no eating out, once, back before American Fork. Made it eleven months. What finally got us was fry sauce, if you can believe it — we just wanted to sit down and have a burger and fry sauce like regular people for one night. I still count that as a win, eleven months is eleven months, but I tell that story because it's the same lesson as the leaky category. You have to plan for the fry sauce on purpose. If there's zero room for it anywhere in the numbers, the budget breaks in about a month, guaranteed, because you're human and humans want a burger sometimes.
What "gathering" is not
It's not judging yet. It's not deciding groceries are too high or the water bill is outrageous or you shouldn't have gotten the thing at Costco. That's next week's work. Tonight is just finding the true number and writing it down where you can see it.
I'll be walking around while you do this. If you're staring at your phone instead of your statements, I will come find you...
Before next time: bring the actual numbers you found tonight, plus one month of bank or credit card statements if you've got them handy, we're going to put it all together next time and see what it says.