When my wife and I were merely high school sweethearts looking each other in the eyes and feeling as googly as any two people could feel without being any way related to the search engine I suggested that she go on a budget. This was possibly one of the best worst ideas I’d had to date in the relationship. You see my wife is a math genius, except that she’s not a budget buffer kinda gal, she’s an accountant at heart and she wants all of the columns to add up and if forty-three cents were missing (or extra) then she would spend far too much time looking for the difference so as to balance her budget. Since then we’ve worked out a much more workable system that allows for a little tiny bit of innacuracy, just enough to not hunt for forty-three cents, but not enough to ignore forty three dollars. As she became frustrated with budgeting my wife gave up because the small details threw her for too great a loop.

Now we budget for zero. By zero I mean that we plan to spend until we have zero dollars in the checking account. We save what we need to save, we calculate our bill payments, but our focus is on the following:

1. Don’t spend it if we don’t have to
2. Anything left over goes into savings for potential snow-flaking/snow-balling if its left over after quarterly taxes
3. Next month if things get tight we may grab any previous left-over cash into the budget to buffer the differences
4. Pay with cash whenever possible, or use the debit card, but only spend what we have

As we’ve employed these principles we’ve been able to manage our finances much better than previous attempts at budgeting. With my wife focused on paying off the debt as fast as possible she’s spent a lot less on the extra little things and we’re making progress on our debt reduction like never before. We’re “budgeting” to have zero left over at the end so that we don’t spend it on the frivolous.

How do you budget?