RV FEATURE
Prior to leaving home in January 2016, it had been
decided to keep a spreadsheet of all our expenses.
Yep, every cent we spent was going to appear
on the spreadsheet. We had decided that this
was the best way to keep track of what we were
spending, and hopefully we wouldn’t go broke. Thanks to the spreadsheet, we gave ourselves a
weekly spend. We chose a day of the week that the
weekly spend money went into our daily account.
That is now all the money we have to spend in a
week. We both have access to the account online,
so we both know what is there to spend.
This decision… well, it was the one that caused
us no end of grief, stress and heartache. You see,
every evening was spent tracking any spending
from that day. It also involved a lot of “you spent
that on what exactly?”, and “did we really need
that?”, or “was there a cheaper option?” and so on. We talk about what we need to spend at the
hardware store, and sometimes we put money
aside from one week to the next to meet that
expense. We talk about how much petrol will
cost to get to our next destination, we have a
regular weekly grocery bill, so we already know
that that money will be disappearing quickly from
the account.
This, as you can imagine, caused a few
disagreements, and meant that both of us
wanted to do the groceries, both of us wanted to
go to Bunnings, etc. The reason: to check the
spending before it happened.
IT BECAME ABOUT MONEY
Now, this is all good in theory, but
it was crazy. Noting down every
cent that was spent was also
stressful, and it made us question if
buying that ice cream for the kids was
a good idea — and as we live in a caravan,
the kids were aware of this going on. So even
they would question buying a coffee on a day out,
or a can of drink.
It became about money, not the memories.
It became an issue in our caravan, and the
spreadsheet became a thing of angst, to the point
that instead of doing it daily, we did it weekly.
Oh dear, I don’t know what I spent MY spending
money on… it was MINE.
So, we quit the spreadsheet, but we didn’t ignore
it. That would have been simply stupid. It became
a blueprint for what we could spend and what we
could not spend in a week.
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