#EXAMPLES OF MONTHLY EXPENSES PROFESSIONAL#

Organize your documents by year to prepare a historical accounting of your expenses.ĭefine and list the categories of expenses and the family members who benefit from the expense. They will also help you substantiate and describe the historical cost to maintain your family’s lifestyle. The average numbers you reach from your record keeping are the same ones you’ll use for proving your reasonable needs. Then add all the months’ totals and divide by the number of months to get an average monthly total for each expense. At the end of a month, add up all of your weekly expenses by category to get a monthly total for each category. An example of a monthly worksheet can be found at the end of this story to modify it for daily use, substitute “Mon., Tues., Wed.,” etc., or “week one, week two, week three” etc. Keep a daily log of any cash purchases.Įnter your current daily expenses under the proper categories into daily or weekly worksheets. Start paying for as many expenses as possible with a credit card or check. To keep better track of expenses, change some of your spending habits. Some of the records you need are: bank account registers, canceled checks, paid bills, credit-card statements, loan papers, and cash receipts.

Several years worth of records are optimum, but records beginning one year prior to any separation may suffice. Your first step to determine the cost for your family’s lifestyle is to gather documents showing how your family has spent its money over a period of time. Charting Your Expenses During Divorce: Historical & Current Expenses In reality, both spouses have to make adjustments in how they each pay for their needs and maintain their lifestyle. This may lead to each ex-spouse believing that he or she is either paying too much or not receiving enough money for support. Quite often, the support amounts don’t satisfy either spouse’s expenses to maintain previous lifestyles or the family’s current reasonable needs. The difference in the definitions between “reasonable needs” and “lifestyle” becomes painfully obvious when a divorce court sets an amount of money for child support or spousal support. Your family’s lifestyle and reasonable needs are the two components of expenses that play a part in a divorce. The qualifier “reasonable” adds the limitations of not excessive or extreme. Webster’s Dictionary defines “lifestyle” as the “consistent, integrated way of life of an individual as typified by his manner, attitudes, possessions, etc.” Reasonable needs are those things necessary to sustain a family with the basic requirements. The cost to meet the reasonable needs of your family may be much different than the cost of your lifestyle.

Planning for these unexpected expenses now will help you budget successfully and achieve your financial goals faster.In a divorce, you’ll hear the phrases “maintain a lifestyle to which your family is accustomed” and “reasonable needs.” There’s an inherent conflict between the concepts of lifestyle and reasonable needs. ( Here’s how I organize these non-monthly budget expenses.) Instead, set aside a small amount in your monthly budget for each of these expenses, and you’ll have no added stress when any of them pop up. If you do you’ll soon find yourself without an emergency fund. You don’t want to rely on your emergency fund as a catch-all for these unexpected expenses because most aren’t emergencies. Then each month from then on, we saved a bit toward our gifts budget, so we’d always be ready. That kid birthday party we were invited to? Well, we ended up gifting something that we already had at home to stop us from going over budget.

Taxes on extra income from work from home income or interest earned.

Tax Preparation (software or accountant).Gifts for when your kids attend their friends’ birthdays.Sports and extracurricular equipment and dues.Travel, not just for vacation but also for holidays, weddings, births, and funerals.Seasonal yard maintenance or snow removal.Attending potlucks or get-togethers where you need to bring food.

weddings, birthdays, baby showers and Christmas

#EXAMPLES OF MONTHLY EXPENSES PROFESSIONAL#

Professional Licenses and Memberships not reimbursed by work.48 Unexpected Expensesĭid you make a budget this month? I hope so! Here are 48 unexpected expenses you might have forgotten. Include this list of unexpected expenses in your budget this month. But that’s still no reason to leave them out of your budget. You might simply forget about them, or it may be hard to predict the cost. I hope this list will save you some of the frustration that comes along with going over budget due to unexpected expenses! Many of these are things you pay only once a year, or every few years, or things that are somewhat unpredictable. Along the way I kept track of all the different unexpected expenses, so I could plan ahead and include them in my budget.

Examples of monthly expenses