Year-end budget scan

There are just ten days left in 2023 and this morning I took the opportunity to take a look at my budget to see if I think there’s anything I need to adjust. I’m toying with doing a Fresh Start in 2024 but I’m pretty much in the “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” camp, so I probably won’t. (Though keep an eye out for a future post on doing a Fresh Start.)

Here’s what I was looking for in my scan:

• First, I looked at my green bubbles of available money to see if there was any money left over that I don’t need in that category. I keep a pretty close eye on things, so I found only two categories that had money I didn’t need soon. (One was an excess of Personal Property Tax money, since our annual year-end bill was lower than expected and the other was Holiday Cards.) I clicked on each category, then clicked Reset Available Amount to zero out the category and add the money to RTA. Then I assigned the money to my Furniture category because we’ve decided to buy new living-room furniture in 2024.
• I took a look at my Assigned columns and compared them to the Activity column in each category to see whether my targets seemed right. This revealed some discrepancies that caused me to adjust my target and/or target type.
• I then double-checked all my targets for my non-monthly expenses to make sure that I had the right target type. When I started using targets (back then they were called goals), I sometimes used Needed for Spending targets when I could have benefited more from Monthly Savings targets. As part of this scan, I adjusted a couple more targets.

Scanning your budget to make sure everything’s copacetic needn’t be an activity reserved for the end of the year, but now’s a great time to start if you’re not doing it already. I’m glad I did it this morning!