So I've always struggled budgeting.  Even before with less money I've alway reversed budgeted.  Figured out what was important and what needed to be saved and then spent the rest.

This time I'm sort of doing it but also sort of tracking my spending.  I've been reasonable successful at tracking eating out and groceries which are the budget busters.  It's easy to track airline tickets, hotel stays, or big ticket one off spending.  It's even easy to track monthly kid activity.  But I've found that miscellaneous spending, eating out, groceries seem to get away very easily from me.   Plus before our income seemed to be a bit of a mystery with bonuses and stuff.

Now we are on a strict income only with taxes and medical and it's the same amount every time.  We are netting $5800/pay period which is biweekly.  This needs to lower around $5400/pay period.  That means 2 extra paychecks a year.  But it's easier to budget $11600/month than it is to spread it out. The biweekly paychecks I was thinking should probably go to savings so we automatically save $11600/year getting us close.  This year we've saved close to 40% of our income but it was an odd year for income.

$3150 Mortgage
$720 Robinhood (extra mortgage)
$3600 Spending
$1000 property taxes
$1000 sink funds/savings/travel
$1500 Roth/ESA
=$11470/month

We've been pretty good at sticking to this.  The only small problem controlling the sink funds/traveling.  I'm not sure we'll be perfect but we are trying.  I've been trying to maximize not paying cash for anything travel related and using all our miles and points. 

We also decided to spend $15k on the A/C furnace.  We decided even if we stay 2 more years the people who buy it from us might think a house worth $1m+ should have a new a/c furnace.  I'm going to try to get it on a 0% CC for the next 15 months with a 2% cash back credit card.  Then we'll make monthly payments instead of using all of our sink funds right now.