Budgeting for Maternity Leave

I am 22 weeks pregnant today, which means in roughly another 3 months, I shall be waving bye bye to the office and heading off on 7 months maternity leave. It will be bliss, believe me. But it also means that we need to plan our finances accordingly.

We have a number of credit cards with interest free purchases that need paying off within the next 12 months that I need to take into account, along with car loans, rent and other bills, and of course christmas. Greg and I sat down and tweaked our current budget for the next 12 months to get me through my maternity leave.

I use a simple excel spreadsheet, and start off by listing all regular expenses. We are both paid monthly, and I include a weekly, fortnightly and monthly figure in my budget. Our expenses include rent, loan payments, daycare, insurance, internet and phone bills, amongst other things. Yours may look completely different. I also include groceries and petrol money.

This is my everyday budget. I have to now include extra repayments on our credit cards to ensure their balances are paid off by the correct due dates. To work this out I simply took each balance and divided it by how many months were left between now and the due date and put this figure into my budget. This is what I need to put on this particular card to have it paid off by its due date.

Once I have worked out how much is left over from our income after the expenses are paid I allocate this to savings. Normally this would be split in half and half would go into savings, with the other half going onto one of the loans but with maternity leave coming up, savings are going to be extremely important as emergency money.

I think that quite possibly I did leave it awfully late to make sure that we were covering ourselves financially, though it really didn't occur to me just how quick my maternity leave was rolling on up until my boss asked how much longer he had before he had to hire someone to replace me!

Do you budget on an everyday basis?
What method do you use?

 

I am back blogging for the first time a long time, please bear with me while I set up my social networking pages!