Are you a budget nerd? Please be honest.

[Anonymous]

 I admit I am a budget nerd to the extreme.  This may have been the reason I picked the career path I chose, accounting.  I just finished mailing all of May, 2012 bills, I was ill, so I did not get them mailed on the 1st of the month.  I got them in the mail on the 8th of May, LATE in my book.  Tonight, I started on June, 2012's budget and am happy to report it balances AND I am able to put a little more in savings, and this trend will only go up every month, savings amount I mean, until I have what I feel I should need in case of any emergency.

Some of you have heard and done the program by Dave Ramsey, I went and took my teen aged son with me.  If you think I am tight with money, you have not met my ds. lol

I grew up with Depression Era Grandparents and Parents, so living well below your means was drummed into me all my life.  I hammered the same message into my children. 

Am I a freak of Nature?  Or are there really other Mom's who keep track of all spending?  I cannot be the only one who does this. 

Please, please don't give me the excuse you have too little money to worry about a budget, I learned the hard way, that the less I made, the more control I needed over my meager funds to make the money last all month.  I only get paid once a month, so on the first of the month, I write out all the checks, the process really begins in the last week of the prior month, to see what I did last month as a gauge of the next (or current) month. 

I balance my checkbook on line at least three times a day.  OCD for sure, but after working in the banking industry and knowing that I would be fired on the spot if I bounced a check, that has kept me on the straight and narrow path.

I keep my budgets on my Excel spread sheets and have budgets on disc format for at least 20 years.  Before I got 'rich' and could afford a PC, I kept them on basic 12 column ledger paper, just like Grandma used!  

You can stay anonymous, but please let me know that I am not the only woman who takes financial matters very, very seriously.  Thanks. 

[Anonymous - Original Poster]

 send me a pm and I will email you a copy

Quoting Anonymous:

 I really want to see your spreadsheet layout!

 If I was still married to my dang exh, I would be bald from him buying new cars every six months, taking out one loan to make the payments on another loan, that is what killed our marriage.  That and the cheating.  He chewed up almost $125k in one year, which was from my Mom's estate.  After that I NEVER shared an account with him.  We both worked, so I paid all the bills and he chased anything in a skirt, including cross dressed men.

[UpstateAnnette]

Dave Ramsey for President!!!! I wish he would run.   I too am very budget conscious.   

WE ARE DEBT FREE!!!

We even went down to the Dave Ramsey studios and did the debt free scream last October.