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Razor Thin

Lately, the Mild Wife and I have been trying to be better about budgeting. Luckily for us, there's no impending costs that forced this on us, nor are we struggling to make payments. We just want to save up for big costs faster. Since it's not likely that we're going to win the lottery any time soon (it's particularly hard when you don't purchase tickets), we figured we're try to be more efficient about the money that we already make. Basically, try to put money more towards the savings categories than the spending ones.

It's worth noting that we're not really doing anything fancy in order to try to shift our habits. We didn't subscribe to new alerts on every credit card and bank account, we didn't hire a financial advisor, nor did we invent a new algorithm for how to put money away. We just started by tracking what we spend.

Basically, we decided that we had categories, and we were allowed to spend a certain amount in each category. We have a spreadsheet, and we update it every few days. It's probably not nearly clever enough for wide-spread use, but that's the gist of what we do.

Now, it's only been a few weeks, but it's looking like we're going to hit the mark on most of our categories (sadly, I am the one guilty for the categories where we're going to go over). As best as I can tell, it seems to be working. As you can imagine, we're both pretty happy about that.

Of course, keeping track of the numbers on the spreadsheet means that we both have a pretty good feel for how much leeway we have. Two weeks ago, we had something like $6 left in one of those categories. Let's just call it Category X to simplify my descriptions from here on out ("the unnamed category where we still had some cushion" doesn't quite roll off the tongue). So, I figured we weren't going to spend any more money in Category X. You can't purchase too many things at that price.

Actually, I should amend that. *I* can't buy too many things at that price. Apparently, the Mild Wife is a genius at this, and she found something for $5.84 in that category. It is no accident that she spent exactly as much as we could to stay under the threshold we'd set. I remember entering some other data into our spreadsheet, and noticing that we were all of 16 cents under the limit. I looked over, and she grinned. Yup, totally intentional.

We're going to keep at this whole budgeting thing, but I'm really curious to see how this plays out. I have a feeling this is not the last time that we see the actual expenditure come that close to the limit in that category.

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