Since my goal to become financially fit and stable, I’ve accomplished a lot of things! I’ve paid off credit card debt, paid off my car, saved up for a baby hospital bill, and have almost funded our emergency fund. Woo!

However, I’m hoping to do more. I want to start reigning in our budget so we can achieve even more. In that regards I’m hoping to do more budget reviews and post more for accountability.

I started with a review of our June spending. This is just our expenses and I don’t include things that come out pre-tax or savings other than our college savings for Penny.

Some of the good points:

Daycare was less expensive than expected. It will be cheaper on a weekly basis than we planned and the first week was half of what we expected.

Our hospital bill was as expected and we paid it in full! Big win after originally stressing so much about the cost of giving birth!

Some of the bad things: 

Our utilities were more expensive than expected due to warmer weather.

AT&T charged us twice in accordance with a change in their payment schedule.

We overspent in several categories: groceries/household, eating out, gifts, shopping. This is all variable spending and things we could have said no to… but didn’t.

It was the first month back in tracking these categories since I didn’t worry about it during the month of and following giving birth. Seems like we got very lax with our spending then since we can easily get out of control when disorganized.

For the next few months I’m hoping to focus on better meal planning, less eating out, and no shopping except for necessities. I’ve got some strong ideas on what to do better for next month after running through the review of June so I’ll consider this successful!