What I am trying to do is to judge what we "need" to live on, and then take only that out of the paychecks each two weeks... the rest can go to debt. So currently, every month, I have about 3,300 worth of static bills and expences. Then every few weeks we have about $100 worth of other bills. This is being VERY gentle, and with no deprovation at all (in fact, this is adding in a lot of "extras", and everything I can think of... and many of these are not that high every month, like our Car Insurence, we pay 4 months on, and then get two months off, and our electric is sky high right now (I actually put it in for more) because it is the dead of winter, so actually we will need quite a bit less than that.
But I want to see what we can comfortably live on and what we should be shooting for. We will eventually take more and add more on debt as we realise that a few things arn't needed, like quickly next year I will be gardening, and the tanning will not be needed (but garden supplies will be, so that may even out)... etc. I just want to have a base to work from. This is not how I will do my budgeting. My actual idea is to take everything above a certian amount out of each check and drop it in savings.
This has only been possible for the last 6 months. Before that we were making next to nothing... now, all of a sudden, we will clear nearly $50k this year. OMG. Two years ago we made $15K total... all year long.
Val