Our First Month With a Joint Account is Over
Jul 2nd, 2008 by Nut
I’ve written about this before, but M and I have finally made it through our first month as a married couple, which means sharing a joint bank account and adjusting our spending habits accordingly. The major issues we had to clear were figuring out how we were doing on a week to week basis, budget-wise, because we both use two different systems. M uses cash and doesn’t like to use credit cards, while credit cards are all I use. So that took some tweaking, but towards the end of the month we had the hang of it.
The good news is we stayed under budget and met our savings goal. I just figured it out and our current savings goal has us putting away around 13% of our net income, which isn’t bad considering I’m putting away 8% (pretax) in my 401(k) and contributing the full amount to the Roth. So 13% of net income is pretty decent. I’d like to save more because I’m obsessed with it and I want to save more for our new place, but this was our first month so one thing at a time.
More good news: we didn’t live too frugal of a month. We shopped, I bought more RAM for M’s computer, bought Dragon Naturally Speaking (a steal on Buy.com at the time — more on this purchase later this week), and we even threw our very first dinner party with all our new stuff from the wedding. In other words, we lived our life. This obviously makes the whole month a much happier experience — it’s a great feeling when you realize that, yes, you can save a good amount of money and still live your life without wanting to restrict spending every chance you get (even though I still did that).
The bad news is I’m still very obsessed with our finances. I track it almost every day and every dollar spent makes me feel like we’re closer to the abyss that is being over budget. Some of our bills went up (my cell phone bill, for instance, even though I just got it reduced last month) and that made me feel like we were doing something wrong. This end-of-month tally should help me kind of relax next month while I try to find a way to get that savings rate up into the 15-16% range (daddy wants a balcony and central AC on the lake, baby!).
In the end, I’m very happy with our first month. I’m sure there will be bumps in the road down the line (M’s car is making some ominous noises) but I feel we’re pretty well prepared for them. On to month #2!
Open an ING account and get a $25 bonus!
Who Killed the Electric Car?
