I don't budget either. I should but I don't. Some weeks we're scraping the bottom of the barrel other weeks we are cruising. We're only on one income with the base rate of that being just under $700 a week. We also get just over $500 in centrelink allowances, and currently receive a low income health care card. When I was made redundant from full time work we consolidated all of our debts and put everything onto the Mortgage so we were only paying off one debt each fortnight. We still do that now, if we need to buy a new car, do house renovations or whatever we take the money against the Mortgage. Makes the Mortgage end date longer, but we're still only paying the one major thing. Due to doing that I managed to scrounge up an extra $90 a fortnight that I put onto my mortgage voluntarily. I can cancel that at any time if I need to.

If I get a job next year, which is my goal, we'll loose a lot of our benefits and the low income health care card. So I will be back to paying over $100 a month in medication alone. I plan to put so much of the income I will receive onto the mortgage as well, if I can afford too since I will have to factor in the cost of petrol etc once working.