How do you become a cash family?

[Indadhanu]

Come join the cash club! We've recently gone back to being a cash family! We;ve got a fairly relaxed budget. What we do is, each fortnight when I get paid, we divy up the money (online obviosuly). We send however much we need to keep aside for bills and we send it to the savings account thats not linked to a card.

When we work out the budget, we work out how much our bills will come to each fortnight. So we pay rent fortnightly, get a monthly Telstra bill (internet, phones, foxtel), a quarterly electricity bill, yearly rego etc, and we work out how much it all comes to fortnightly, and we send that much to savings so that when each bill comes either fortnightly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, we can just pull it straight from the savings without stress, knowing that the money is there. Just remember it has a place to go, and don't spend it in the meantime!

We then work out how much we want to leave ourselves for groceries and fortnightly incidentals, and we send the rest to a savings account as actual savings. next time we go to the shops we get out the cash, we only buy whats on the list and keep track of what everything costs, and if it's too much we put non-essentials back, and if we have some left over we might treat ourselves. We also keep some 'pocket money' for if we want to buy something for ourselves, or if we don't we just save it at the end of the fortnight (so we get out less next fortnight and put more into the savings account).

We don't leave anything in the account linked to the card so we can't overspend, but we do have the money in savings for emergencies (our fridge just died so we needed to buy a bar fridge in the meantime, so we bought it cheap at the boxing day sales from our savings). So at the supermarket, if it comes to too much we just put things back. We do take into account if its goig to be a big shop week, like if we need washing powder or dishwashing tablets or coffee or dog food, and add more to our weekly shopping budget, but we've worked out our average and with cash we make sure we aren't spending more than we need to on food.

It isn't hard once you're established.

(I shoulnd't lie. we do use our credit card for TTC costs, but cash for everything else...)