A few weeks ago I found a budget worksheet online and just stated guesstimating stuff into it. I knew it was pretty crude, but I wanted to get some idea of where things stand. Two kids now with one in infant care and major home repairs ($20K). Anyway things were looking pretty bad, but I knew I only had rough  estimates. DH has been completely resistant to looking at these numbers with me. I finally got to ask why and he was afraid I was going to budget his $5/day lunch money or something. I told him know, we could simply budget cash allowance and that would be fine.Â
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A few days ago we downloaded excel 2010 and he was hot to learn it's new functions. (He's that kind of guy). And then this morning I MADE him look at the worksheet with me. The really nice thing about it is that it also calculates cash flow which is major for us since sometimes we have trouble when we don't do our taxes early  but need to make our Roth IRA contributes. DH is always excellent about manually calculating this. Anyway the happy news is that I forgot DH gets paid weekly and 2x a month. So obviously that made a HUGE difference. We're still underwater this year, but only by about $3K and I think we can solve that with a refi and/or payment plan for the roof. Happy Dance! Huge relief. I feel like we have a great starting point.Â
