Our Life Pie

Inspired by a new year, and one of Gail Vaz-Oxlade's older posts about the life pie, I wanted to do some work to put together ours.



According to Gail, the Life Pie "is very flexible and is only meant as a guide so that you have some sense of balance in your budget. If you’re way over in one place, you have to be way under in another. The bottom line is that you can’t spend more money than you make."



You can see that because Jordan and I have 0% allocated to debt repayment, that leaves us a lot of wiggle room.  We have decided to allocate this money towards life - we've got plans to finish the back yard this year (deck, fence ect) - so that money will come in handy.

 For anyone who doesn't recall the post, or didn't click on the link, here is the breakdown of Gail's recommendations vs the exact percentages of ours.



Not only do we have 0% allocated to debt, we also spend less in housing then she suggests, and we contribute more to long term savings.



For those who like the details, keep reading below.

When filling this in, I started with what we spent last year and also had a look at what our budget for 2013 was - that helped guide this.  Using our utilities tracking history and tracking our daily expenses (gas, vehicle maintenance etc.) also was a big help in being accurate.