Gathering your real numbers, not made-up ones
Last week I told you about the checkbook that wouldn't match and the legal pad that finally sorted it out. Tonight we do the legal pad part — only this time it's yours, not mine.
Let me say one thing first, because I can already see the worry on a few faces. You're picturing that class budget worksheet you maybe filled out once at a bank, the one with "Sample Income: $4,200" already printed in. Set that thing aside. 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 pretend budget teaches you nothing, because you can't get a pretend number wrong. Real numbers are the only ones that count.
So this is what we're gathering, and exactly how to go about it.
Step one: the money coming in
Get your actual take-home pay. Not what you wish you made, not the figure before taxes — the number that actually lands in your account. If you get paid every two weeks, that's worth noticing right now, because it turns some months into three-paycheck months, and that catches people off guard later if they haven't planned for it.
My thinking on this part is simple, and I'll say it plainly: round your income down. If you're not certain a bonus or some overtime is going to show up, don't count it yet. If you turn out to be wrong, you want to be wrong in the direction where you end up with a little extra instead of coming up short. No one has ever been 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 holds steady. Write every single one down with the actual amount, not a guess.
And here the rule flips 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 just because that's the good month. Write $130. Same reasoning as before, only turned around — 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 careful 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 simply different from 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 outrageously expensive. Because it was a NEW line I hadn't accounted for — and new lines are exactly the sort of thing that quietly makes a budget stop matching reality.
Step three: the leaky stuff
This is the one people fudge, and it's also the one that matters most. Groceries. Eating out. The "quick stop for milk." I've mentioned before that I tracked this for three months once, just to prove a point to myself, and it came to about forty dollars a trip by the time you're standing at the register — every single time. That's not a guess. That's off the pad.
For tonight, just get an honest number for the last month. Add up every grocery receipt, every fast food stop, every DoorDash order, 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 yes, this'll cost you an extra ten minutes, but please 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 slide because it's twelve bucks and who's got the 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 win 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. We 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 it because it's the same lesson as the leaky category. You have to plan for the fry sauce on purpose. If there's no 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 is 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 only about finding the true number and writing it down where you can see it.
I'll be walking around while you do this. If I spot you 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 tells us.