In the past 2 years or so I’ve taken over the bulk of the bill paying and finance planning from my husband. He started a company with a friend and working on that and his 9-5 job started taking up too much of his time. Besides that, I love playing with numbers. I thoroughly enjoyed my accounting courses in college and my time working as a bank teller.


My husband and I started using the Envelope system of budgeting after we bought our new house in 2006. At it’s simplistic this means that in order to purchase anything, you have to have the money in the bank first. This seems like a ‘duh’ thing for some people but we just seemed to be struggling with it. We kept having things creep up that would inevitably make it so that we had an ‘IOU’ in the envelope. That starts to get extremely frustrating after a while.

In the past year or so, I’ve started creating Envelopes for any purchase that I can predict. For example, you know that you’re going to have to buy new tires for your car every 5 years or so. So if your tires cost you $500 over 5 years, that’s $100 a year or $8.33 a month. I’ve started putting away $8 or 9 a month every month so that when the time comes to get new tires, we’ll be ready.


Getting started with this is a little tricky. Say you bought tires 2 years ago, you’ll have to save that $500 over 3 years instead of 5. I put together a spreadsheet of items like that so it was easier to see the math. The columns I created were: Item Name, Total Cost of Item, Number of Months till Needed, Cost per Month. The only column that has an equation in it is the “Cost per Month” column. The equation is “Total cost” divided by “Number of Months”.


A byproduct of this is that we’re now able to save more consistently. Because we have money already set aside for our large purchases, we’re not scamming money out of the Emergency fund to try to cover these bills. It also gives you a little peace of mind to know that when the time comes and you need to make that purchase, the money is already there.