Radvent Day 6: Starting

I am still behind on the Radvent prompts. Lincoln's birthday party is this Saturday (ack! 3 years old! Must resist urge to go wake him up and rock him like a baby...), so after that I will have my evenings back again. Well, sort of...back as much as Bennett will allow, I suppose :P

Lucas and I aren't big spenders (and with that, Hey, Big Spender will be stuck in my head for at least the next 2 days...). We don't have much debt (just the house and Lucas' student loan), we don't go out much, we pay our bills on time, etc. We have a savings account. But, even with all that, we don't really track our money very well. We have always had the basic outline of a budget, but we very rarely check to see that we stay in those lines. I got good at checking it for awhile, and then once I saw that I was blowing our grocery budget out of the water every month, I just stopped checking (to be fair, I had set our budget pretty low...and hadn't adjusted any for when Lincoln began eating normal sized portions, nor when Bennett started solids...I was trying to feed 3.5 people on a budget for 2--and I DON'T coupon). It wasn't like it was draining our bank account--we weren't using the entertainment budget, I had waaaaay too much budgeted for baby expenses, and other categories were likewise not getting used, so the grocery over spending never really mattered. But, it would be nice to have a better grip on those funds. There is college to save for, vacations we'd like to plan, and retirement to fund since social security will probably not be available by the time we need it...

So. My goal:
Plan out and stick to a monthly budget
-Categorize all expenses
-Redo budget amounts for categories in which we always over/under spend
-Create savings accounts for both kids
-Create an account to save for future traveling
-Discuss purchasing giftcards with a set amount for each week's grocery shopping trip to curb overspending.