Several years ago, I started keeping a spreadsheet of where our money comes from, and where it goes. The initial steps were painful, because my estimate of costs was about 50% of what we actually pay on a routine basis, plus costs seemed to pop up every time I turned around. But after about six months, we had a pretty good summary going, and now I can easily show what our expenses have been, by general category, for the last three years, by month. One of the great surprises was that there's always something.
If we routinely pay out four thousand dollars in bills, and one month we pay out three thousand, I can count on something coming up that will bring the average up to about four thousand. If we pay six, I can count on some bills showing up late, so that the next month's payments are less than normal. And, of course, we do find that payments to things like -- oh, gasoline, for one example -- creep up over time, and so the running average climbs over time. Its something to keep an eye on, though our track record on actually doing anything about it isn't all that great.
But we're working on it.
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