Finally. I’ve been meaning to update this for a while now but decided it was quite necessary with all the changes adding up. My budget might look a little odd to some people because I’m not using a standard budget. I’m currently use the Padawan Budget while I track my spending over time so that I’ll be able to make a budget that’ll work for us.

If the image is too small, you can click on it to make it larger. Okay, so all the *’s are the things that have been updated since last time. I’ve also separated our rent and renter’s insurance, below they were just lumped together—I think this is better kept separate. Okay, on to the changes:

*Renter’s Insurance

This used to be $17.00 a month before but I called them to change our coverage. Over the past two years, we’ve been getting rid of lots of stuff but never updated the amount of renter’s insurance coverage we had. Since we don’t have as much stuff, we shouldn’t need to pay more money each month to cover more than we need. Also, we had the highest coverage available when we initially signed up and I’m not even sure if we needed that much in the first place. We’re now spending $5.59 less each month ($67.08 a year).

*Netflix

Ha, ha, ha. Silly Netflix, you really thought I was going to pay you like 20 bucks a month for streaming and 1 blu-ray out at a time. I think not! We’ve ditched the movies getting mailed to us and kept only the online streaming. Hopefully we’ll end up getting rid of the streaming as well in the future. We used to pay $12.97, then they decided to get greedy and the same plan went up to $19.45 a month. Now we’re spending $10.80 less each month ($129.60 a year).

*GameFly

Wooo hooo, my honey cancelled his World of Warcrap account (which was the best day ever) and has decided to go with GameFly. I swear I fell in-love all over again that day. 😉 We were paying $16.22 each month for WOW and instead we’re paying $17.26 for GameFly. We’re paying more but I’m doing so happily. So, we’ve increased our spending in this area by $1.04 a month ($12.48 a year).

*Electric Bill

Another increase but I’m not happy about this one. It’s been a while since I went in and averaged out our electric bills, so I went ahead and did the last 12 months worth. It’s funny how I keep trying to do things to lower our electric bill but it keeps rising…maybe if they wouldn’t keep raising their rates, we’d be more successful. We didn’t even use our air conditioner all summer and that is so unlike me.

*Water/Sewer/Garbage

This was a new expense, our apartment complex decided they wanted to start charging for this instead of including it. No big deal, right? Actually, yes. Instead of only paying for the amount of water we use, you know—just our apartment, they thought it would be clever to do it different.

The entire complex’s bills are lumped together, then divided by the total number of residents in the complex and then multiplied by the number of people in each apartment. Meaning that no matter how hard we work to save money on this, we’re ultimately going to be paying more for the people who don’t give a $hit. Lame!

Aside from all that, I’ve had time to gather a good amount of bills to average out. Now we’re saving about $12.00 each month on this, the first bill must have been over a month.

I probably should have waited to update this until after the whole cellphone thing was figured out. It feels nice to be up-to-date with our budget though. Well, those are all the changes I have for the budget right now and it only took me a about 20 minutes to update the information (not including writing the post and all that) just in case this is something you might have been putting off. 😉

When was the last time you updated your budget?
How often do you update it?