While reading this post on The Sun’s Financial Diary, I learned about a new benefit for those who are offered a flexible spending account (FSA) through their employer.

I always thought that a flexible spending account was only used for qualifying medical expenses, but it looks like it can also be used to help pay for costs you incur taking care of dependents. I never knew that. It goes to show that it pays to read your benefits documents thoroughly to make the most of what your company has to offer.

If your employer offers you this option in their benefits package, it basically means that you can save up to $5,000 of your pre-tax income to help pay for dependent care expenses. Things like your children’s day care or even the expense of adult day care can qualify.  So, if you are in the 25% tax bracket, this saves you $25 for every $100 you spend on your child’s day care services.  Read your benefits package material to find out more or talk with your HR department.

I don’t have children yet, in fact I’m not even married yet (almost!).  But it is nice to know that I have these types of benefits that I can utilize in a few years.

I have a 105 days left until the day of my wedding. I added a nifty countdown timer on my sidebar.

With all the preparations and planning one thing that my fiancée and I have been trying to do is to stick with a budget. The Microsoft website has a nice wedding budget template for Excel. We’ve been using it to estimate all of our costs and expenses.

The biggest expense will obviously be our Chinese banquet which we plan to spend around $16,000. The restaurant can hold a maximum of 360 people, so that’s 36 tables worth of ten-course meals. Although that may seem like a lot of money, I’m glad that we are doing a Chinese banquet instead of catering because I know that catering would have been much more expensive.

We found a college friend who can do the wedding photography for us. Although she isn’t a professional, she’s done enough weddings that we trust she can give us great pictures for a great price.

We also saved some money by doing the wedding invitations on our own.

Click on the thumbnails below to see what our budget looks like.

My fiancée and I had our last pre-marital counseling session this past Saturday. This last session included the topic of money. We were aware of most of the things the pastor brought up. But, he did advise us that regardless of how we handle our bank accounts, there should be a private discretionary fund set aside for each of us. For example, besides having a joint checking account, we should set aside $100 a month for our personal use; no questions asked.

I personally disagreed with this suggestion because I meticulously track all of our spending. What’s the point of tracking our spending if we end up buying coffee or clothes from this discretionary fund and don’t keep a log of it? However I realized one oversight when tracking every single purchase we both make. In the situation of buying gifts or presents, there would be no element of surprise. My fiancée wouldn’t be able to buy me something special without me seeing it on her credit card or bank account.

So what to do? One suggestion I made to my fiancée was that if she really wants to buy me something, use cash. That way all I see is an ATM withdrawal. It would also limit the amount we would spend on each other.

I haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, but as my wedding approaches I really want to have a solid and thorough financial plan.

How do married couples keep track of their spendings? How do they track their net worth each month? Although I’m not getting married until May 2007, I decided to tackle this question during my winter break. My fiancée and I have talked about finances and budgeting and we agreed that I’d handle all financial matters once we got married. I have a personal budget but my goal was to create a combined budget for the two of us for 2007. To do this I first needed to have a good idea of both of our spending habits. I already keep track of my own spendings, but I needed to know the spending habits of my fiancée. Our spending habits of 2006 would become the basis for our combined budget for 2007. So during my winter break I went through all her 2006 bank statements and credit card statements and logged her spendings (this took me about 5 hours, yikes!). I came up with totals using an Excel spreadsheet and got a good idea of how much she spends in various categories. I wasn’t surprised to find out her spendings on coffee and clothes were higher than mine. I was surprised to find out that her spendings on eating out equaled mine. I always thought she ate out less then I did, but I guess she tends to spend more each time she eats out. Both of us need to learn to cut-down on this once we get married by cooking and packing lunch for work.

After comparing both of our spending habits, my fiancée and I sat down and reviewed our 2006 finances and then talked about what we’d like to see for 2007. Our wedding will be our largest expense for 2007, so any extra spendings we can reduce will be helpful. We both feel we spend too much money in areas of coffee, clothing, and eating out. We’ve reduced our allowed budget in each of those categories and will strive to stick to it during this new year. Now instead of tracking my spendings each week, I’ll be tracking both of our spendings, making sure that we are on track.

All this may seem tedious or boring but keeping a budget and tracking your spendings is absolutely crucial for getting a handle on your families’ finances. Going through this exercise will also reveal where your money is actually going. Since my fiancée had never consistently tracked her spendings, she was actually surprised to find out how much she spends on coffee each month. It has given her motivation to be a little more cautious with the “latte factor“. Read my post on “Keeping Track of Your Spendings” if you need help estimating how much money you spend each year. This will help you create a budget.

Here’s a glimpse of our budget for 2007:

The new year is upon us and now is a great time to unclutter and clean up the house / apartment to prepare for 2007. If you’re like me, you struggle with being a pack-rat and a procrastinator. So, here are some suggestions that can make financial matters easier in 2007:

- Begin to organize all your bills, bank / credit card statements, charitable contribution receipts, investment documents into one folder or manila envelope. This way everything is already gathered when you go and do your taxes. Go through your pile of mail and envelopes and throw away anything you don’t need. Bonus points for organizing them in chronological order .

- If you don’t already have a budget and track your spendings, then now is a great time to prepare to achieve this in 2007. In fact you can make it your New Year’s resolution. Here’s some help and tips on how to keep track of your spendings and maintain a budget.

- Go through your wardrobe and find clothes to donate or throw away. If you haven’t worn it for over an year, you probably aren’t going to miss it. Go to Salvation Army or Goodwill and donate things in good condition. Or better yet, donate to a local shelter where they will give away the clothes to those in need without charging them.

- Read websites and blogs that can help you simplify your life in 2007. Lifehacker and Real Simple are both great sites for inspiration and motivation to simplify things in your day to day.

The 79th carnival of Personal Finance is up at A Penny Saved. You can go and check out my post about tracking your spendings here.

Some posts that stand out to me include:
Your Credit Advisor: Top 25 Web 2.0 apps for money, finance, and Investment
This is a great list of free online applications that all relate to money. Check out free programs that can be used for: Personal Finance, Money Management, Stock Market, and Real Estate,

Time For Some Thrilling Heroics: 6 simple financial tricks for college students(or anyone for that matter)
The tips found here are all fundamental for any person who wants to take control of their finances. Create a budget, gain control of your credit cards, find hot deals, open a high-yield savings account.

Five Cent Nickel: How to protect yourself against identity theft
Small things like using strong passwords and checking your credit report occasionally can go a long way in protecting yourself from identity theft.

Daily Dose of Optimism: Feel Clever while Saving money on Printing
This is something I’ve been meaning to try: refilling your own laser printer cartridges. This post does a good job of explaining what’s involved.

Have you been meaning to create a budget and begin to keep track of all your expenses? Confused about how to start? Well let me share with you the system that I’ve been using for the past two years. Some people use Microsoft Money or Intuit Quicken, but I currently use an Excel approach. I might try out Quicken one day, but for now the worksheets I’ve created gives me enough control to painlessly keep track of all my expenses. It should take no more than 15-20 minutes a week to maintain this Excel file. Here is a sample of the Excel spreadsheet. I will explain the features of my spreadsheet below.

It varies how often I input my spendings, but I open up this Excel file at least once a week. Sometimes more often if I’m playing around with my budget. The usual time of day that works for me is in the morning when I first come into work. Do your updates whenever its convenient, but just make sure you can keep it consistent. I log into my Bank and Credit card accounts and input any new spendings I’ve had since the last time I’ve updated. I also keep a little notepad at my desk that I write down cash spendings throughout the week. The majority of my cash spendings is on meals when I don’t use my credit card. I write down the amount on my notepad and cross it off when I’ve input the amount into my spreadsheet.

Daily Records Sheet
This is where the expenses are all input. All you have to do is input the date, amount, a description or comment, and finally choose the expense category. The reason the expense category has a “pull-down” menu is so that the totals of each category can be calculated and displayed on the ‘Table of Totals’ page. The Excel commands I am using are fairly straight-forward. Nothing fancy here. You can add additional categories into the expense category in column F if you want. As you begin to populate this page, you can use the Sort commands and sort the page based on Category, Amount, etc. Select columns A through D and go to Data -> Sort. Just make sure you don’t select column F. I’ve input a number of expenses as an example, and you can see the totals on the first worksheet.

Table of Totals
This page is somewhat of a hybrid of a budget as well as an expense statement. The Running Total of column F are all the totals in every category from the “Daily Records” worksheet. The Projection of column H gives a projected annual total based of current spending trends. The reason I have this column is so that I can constantly keep an eye on whether I am above or below my budget for any given category. (For example, if my Projection for “Car - Gas” is higher than my Annual Total budget, I know that I need to reduce my spending in that area.) Everything in the Monthly and One Time columns can be modified and changed to reflect your personal budget and spending habits. The worksheet is divided into two basic categories, Set Expenses and Variable Expenses. The Set Expenses category is for recurring expenses that remain the same each month. The Variable Expenses are any other expenses you have that fluctuates from month to month. At first it might a little difficult to estimate how much you should budget for each category, but as you begin to keep track of you daily expenses, the annual Projection can give you a better picture of how much annual spending you might have in any given category.

This sample worksheet is a starting point for you to begin taking control of your spendings. You can set certain goals of paying off your student debt or setting aside a chunk of money each month into savings. By using the “Table of Totals”, you can begin to plan how much spendings you need to reduce to achieve your goals.

Over at MyMoneyBlog, Jonathan encourages his readers to setup a 6-month financial goal to strive for from now up until May. Leave a comment at this post and you will recieve some sort of prize at the end of the six months.

Both my fiancée and I are trying to save $10,000 for our upcoming wedding in the end of May. We figure that $20,000 will be a good budget to work with to cover all our expenses. We have a preliminary budget that keeps us under $20,000 but just in case of any other expenses come up I’ve planned to save $12,000 instead of $10,000.

November 2006 = $5,700
May 2007 = $12,000 (So $6,300 more to go in six months.)

For some unknown reason I have been blessed with an abnormally fast metabolism. I don’t know why, maybe because I am fairly active. But whatever the reason, I find myself constantly hungry. To the point where it’s not only annoying, but costly. Let me give you an example: I’ll order a foot-long combo from subway for around $7.00 and eat the whole thing for lunch. By 4:00PM I am famished. And I eat breakfast everyday too. On top of that I am snacking throughout the day on cereal, pretzels, pop-tarts, etc. I am spending way too much money on groceries and eating out. Now granted, I do eat out more often than I would like. I know that I should be cooking more often and bring lunch to work. So this is what my food expenses look like so far this year:

———– As of 10/20/06 —– Projected 2006
Groceries –- $1355.41 ——– $1694.26
Eating Out – $2562.90 ——- $3203.63
——————————————————–
Total –——– $3918.31 ——- $4897.89
So this comes out to a daily average of $13.67 that I spend on nourishing myself. Ouch, something needs to change in 2007 because I can’t keep spending this much on food.