As boring as it sounds we generally don’t spend other than the regular monthly utilites, mortgage, gas, groceries. We plan for $60/wk for misc, but so far in 2010 have only taken it out twice – I may remove it from the plan in future as we clearly don’t have many places to spend cash. I work from home at the moment so no spending opportunities. My husband doesn’t drink coffee and he and the kids all pack lunches so no spending required during the day. We do groceries and fill up the cars each weekend.

We haven’t had cable in 20yrs. The 6 channels we get off the air are more than enough to keep us glued to the TV far too much as it is. We don’t specifically budget for clothing or entertainment as we rarely spend on these categories. It wouldn’t make sense to enter an amount every week or month and have to keep moving it to the next month when it doesn’t get spent. With kids homework and sports practice our weeknights don’t allow for “entertainment” and it’s just not us to run out to eat or hang around in a bar. On weekends we do family outings, hang out at home and relax or do odd jobs.

Our simple lifestyle means we cover the basics with 55% of our take home. Having all our planned expenses mapped out a year in advance means I can assess every week how much I can skim off and send to our retirement accounts or extra mortgage payments. If we do have a rare extra expense to cover I just skim off less or don’t skim off the excess at all for the required number of weeks to pay for it (clothing, restaurant meal, snow tires, vehicle).

We realize our scaled down lifestyle isn’t the norm, but we’ve chosen to do without a lot of stuff others consider basics, but on the other hand we splurge on travel. Marked down groceries on one hand, Europe for a month with the kids on the other hand. Strange but it’s a balance that works for us.

All that’s left is disposable income. That stack of $20 bills is split in two and put in 2 cans in my kitchen. I generally don’t carry money with me unless I specifically go somewhere to spend it.

I’ve been doing this for years and I have no money stress or worries.

What I’ve noticed I do now that I know where my money tends to go (i.e. I spend more on dining out and tech gadgets than I should!), I made a point to cut back on those activities. Since I’ve substantially changed my behavior, I don’t need a budget to keep an eye on each day. Instead, I just want to know when I’m getting close to racking up spending where I previously said I would not.

There are free ways to set this stuff up once and let it ride for a few months. I think, especially when paying down debit is involved, a strict budget makes perfect sense. You’ve got to create the discipline to allocate your money to one place instead of another if it doesn’t already exist.

But, like you’ve touched upon above – I have changed my behaviors for the better overall. I don’t dine out nearly as much as I used to, and I watch the grocery spending by seeking out sale or generic items for a percentage of my grocery shopping. A daily budget isn’t so much my thing any longer.

- Chelsea (from Quicken).

like @Glenn, we project our routine bills like utilities, or fixed bills like cable on the spreadsheet. Our idea of budgeting is that I put a limit of $x for each credit card (we use different ones depending on the kind of purchase) each month, and we try to maintain under that amount (which is normally the case). these are inputted as debits like any other bill in our spreadsheet. i have two columns, estimate and actual, which allows me to delineate what should be our limit for x credit card and allows me to adjust what we actually spent. it’s quite simple to use the =sum() function. i too project out 1 year in advance.

each month shows all our bill and our saving/retirement/investment accounts. it does take one whole sheet per month, though.

So ys, I budget without budgeting, LOL.

I have a spreadsheet made out that shows either (a) what I’ve been billed for that’s due in the next two weeks or (b) what I estimate I’m going to be billed for it. The estimates get gradually replaced with real numbers as they become available. Most of the time, these estimates are above the actual bill.

The spreadsheet uses formulas to calculate the estimates, and are based either on the 12-month maximum or the 12-month average, with a handful of exceptions (my power and gas bill, for instance, is based on the three-month average centred around 12 months ago, plus 5%).

At the end of it, that number is subtracted from my paycheque, and another $500 is subtracted to cover groceries, gasoline, and other household necessities.

Next, if my reserve fund is under $100, it gets topped up. This is used to cover small mistakes, and is kept in the chequing account as a form of overdraft protection.

Whatever is left then goes into my debt snowball.

So, as I say, I sort of budget. I know how much to expect to pay on billed items well in advance (that spreadsheet runs out to December 2010, and will be extended to December 2011 in January) but I don’t really budget the individual things like groceries, gasoline, entertainment, etc, except as a big lump.

The last few months though have been a challenge. Being unemployed and having major car repairs come up has left me in quite a bit of credit card debt and made it really tough to budget out the usual expenses along with paying down the debt. At the end of the month, I take my statements and by hand calculate what goes towards paying down debt and what will I have for the next month. There’s something about physically writing it out that lets me get a better idea of what my money is doing.