When we first got married, Martin and I decided to budget our expenses. I don't remember the reasoning at the time, but it became a really powerful tool to help us live our values.
We started with simply keeping all our receipts for 3 months, and from that worked out reasonable budget categories and amounts. After a couple of years we moved from a physical ledger to the GNUCash accounting programme (a shift for which I took a lot of persuading!), which enabled our system to become more powerful. By 2023 we had over 60 expense categories (many of them sub-catergories or sub-sub-categories off primary categories) and a really good overview of our financial situation. Over the last 15 years we know where all but about $700 of our money has gone....
But over the past six months or so, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the situation. On the one hand, a practical consideration. Just Kai has been growing; our accounts were taking around an hour every week - sometimes more, rarely less - and that was time I'd much rather give to Just Kai. On the other, more of a theological one.
