How do you budget?

I've taken a look at our finances and realized that if DH & I want to really start saving for a house & still go on vacation or race (in his case) we need to start coming up with a better way to budget ourselves...
So I'm curious to know...

When budgeting your monthly $...do you & DH have a certain amount of $ each that is your spending money?

And are vices (cigarettes, alcohol..etc) paid for out of your own spending money? Or is it budgeted for with regular expenses?

What about fast food (lunch) while at work?

Re: How do you budget?

we don't really have a budget .... but we try to put a certain amount of money in our savings account every month (the rest can be spent)

DH prefers putting money in weekly rather than monthly so he doesn't accidentally spend it.

Re: How do you budget?

We take what we make and first look at what we have to spend/budget for...

rent
bills
loans
etc.

then the main thing after that is food. we set a budget for that.

then between whats leftover (there usually is none) its a few dollars towards savings or go out to eat or buy something...

We don't smoke so we don't have that expense. Alcohol we try to budget in with our food expenses (we cook with alcohol about as often as we drink it). I make big dinners so that we both have lunch the next day. this saves us from having to spend for lunches.

Re: How do you budget?

We made up a spreadsheet with estimated amounts for all our joint expenses...food, utilities, rent, insurance, etc...we each contribute to that and then whatever is leftover is our own cash for individual expenses like our personal cc's, lunch at work, clothes, gifts for each other, etc.

ETA: We put in a 'misc expenses' line in our budget...so every month we are setting aside money for times when we go out to dinner together, for alcohol, etc...its a pretty large amount of money so that we still have some to put away into savings every couple of months.

Re: How do you budget?

Before getting married I would pay the majority of my bills about 3 weeks ahead of time. I would only keep about 6-800 in my checking and put the remainder into savings.

DH and I still have to sit down and figure out exactly what we're doing with budgeting, saving, spending etc.

Both of our vices are food. We LOVE to go out to eat and apparently I tend to spend to much $ at the supermarket lol.

Re: How do you budget?

we take out a set amount every paycheck for bills (rent, cars, credit cards, cell phones). we have a nother portion that goes into savings and then whatever is left over is spending money and that goes to food shopping, gas, pet expenses, going out to eat etc.

neither of us smoke or have any other habit of the sort that we need money for