Cash

We follow Dave Ramsey in our home. We love his principles for paying off debt, saving, and building wealth. My favorite quote of his is "Live like no one else, so later you can live like no one else". One of the things I have been doing for years is following a cash budget. Now, I don't go to the extremes that others do, paying cash for everything, but I do like to have cash funds for certain things like clothing, auto maintenance, medical/dental, date night and so on. The key is, when we don't spend it for the month, it rolls over to the next month, thus we have more money in the cash fund. I believe Dave calls these "sinking funds". So, if we don't go on a date for March, that means it rolls over to the next month, thus I have more money to spend in April for our date. I take out cash every month for our sinking funds which we have designated in our budget. I still use our check card for a lot of things which I track in our budget app on my iphone, but for the 10 or more things I have sinking funds for, I don't have to worry about tracking every little purchase and I like that it builds up over time. So when that unexpected doctor visit comes up, I can pay in cash instead of it causing a dent in our budget. The picture above is a cash enevelope system I ordered off Etsy.