Do you budget? Are you living on a budget? What kind of budget are you on? Is it helping your plasectomy?

In our home we follow a zero dollar based budget, something we have never done until the start of this year. I have detailed in the past how this is going for us and it continues to get better. The first month there were fights over the money and where it should go, extremely stressful. The second month, less stress and we worked through it, but rocky still. This month it did take us a couple of days to complete the entire month, have the plan for our money and we still fell a little short of funds. The shortage is being resolved by selling items on a large auction site and free classified ads. This has helped us out and gave a much needed “phew, we made it.” Of course when next month rolls around we will probably be in the same situation.

One of the tools we use is the online gazelle budgeting software available from the Total Money Makeover website. We had received a 30 day free trial during a promotional period from purchasing one of the Dave Ramsey products and gave the tool a try. It has a very clean, easy wizard approach to help creating that first budget and maintaining it. There is also a lite version of the gazelle budget software available here to try out which works as well, but lacks the wizard walk through and the breakdown of your payees. It does cost to be member of the Total Money Makeover website at $9.95 a month to get the complete online budget software and it may be of value to you. The membership does also include access to podcasts of his radio show, community forums, but I mainly use it for the software at the moment. I really like that I can access it at home, work or any location with internet access if need be. However, at $10 a month that money may be better suited for my plasectomy so I have started to use a free alternative that I like very much and considering moving to entirely.

A superb free option to the online software is available from the Enemy of Debt website and can be found here. They were extremely generous in offering this tool free as it very well laid out, direct and easy to use. If you are familiar with the Dave Ramsey plan or simply need a FANTASTIC zero dollar based spreadsheet I highly recommend the one over at Enemy Of Debt. It auto calculates, gives percentages of your income in each category, and has a tab for the lump sum saving that needs to be done throughout the year for items such as furniture, Christmas shopping, saving for auto repair, home repair, etc.

Try it and let me know what you think or what you are currently using.