November Budgeting

November is one of my favorite months. It’s all about cozy sweaters, hot cider, and hanging out with family. I’m a homebody all year, but the fall to winter transition time has me curled up at home as early as possible.

The shorter days seem to fly by, and as we prepare for the holidays I’m spending a bit too much time online shopping. I’m hoping to get everything bought and maybe even wrapped by December 1.

So, it’s important that I do a mid-month check on my budget this month, especially. Is my spending on track? Have I overdone it anywhere? That impulse spending gets me, more than I’d like to admit.

Here are a couple of the things that we’ve put in our budget this month:

• Thanksgiving foods & Holiday baking

• Christmas gifts

• Gutter cleaning (this was not originally planned, but necessary)

• Gas increase (new truck costs more than the minivan, shocker!)

• Firewood

I’ve been doing a budget for years and I’m still making adjustments each month. Even though we save for home maintenance, this month we had some major expenses…five digits of them! We recently discovered water was getting into our crawl space. So we needed the gutters cleaned and decided to get them covered with mesh and we also had a sump pump installed and the crawl space encapsulated. Cha-ching-a-ring-a-ding! Our saving grace here was our recent house refinance. The cash on-hand meant we didn’t need to finance the work and we got a discount. We originally planned to use the money to replace the stick on tiles in our kitchen with real tile and do some other remodeling…but that’s on hold now because all that remodeling money went to the crawl space.

One of the things we save for all year, but rolls into our budget as “income” in November, is Christmas. I have a Christmas Club account at a local credit union, which allows us to save each month toward holiday gifts and expenses. Then I pull it out and use it as we shop. Anything we take out of savings I add to our budget as income with a note where it came from.