Keeping an updated budget is an important part of fiscal management. Without keeping track of how much is coming in and going out, your ability to save is compromised.
As we all know, the best thing to do with a raise in your paycheck is to pretend like you never got it, and save it before it ever shows up in your paycheck. Despite seven raises in the past three years I’ve managed to remain with the exact same take home pay.
When getting a new job it can take a bit to rework your budget, not knowing exactly what your first paycheck will look like. In our case, I’ll both be getting by far the largest paycheck I’ve ever received, plus there are no taxes on the first $80k when living abroad.
All of this is great, but it makes budgeting a bit of a challenge. We figured that we might as well take a stab at it and readjust once my first paychecks start rolling in this October. For the time being we’ve just presumed the standard 30% in taxes, even though this is likely to be considerably less.
Note that our normal mortgage payment is around $2k, so the extra funds here will be to pay down the more expensive note on our place. There are also obviously many unknowns about what my expenses will be while in Afghanistan. For now I’ve kept spent levels the same, and we’ll readjust once I have a better picture of what my month to month expenses are.
Lastly, we’ve included a very high estimate for our R&Rs (rest and relaxation or romance and reconnection). We figured that we’d rather keep the estimates on the higher side and then pocket any savings that might occur. Something tells me that we won’t want to be back packing for our time together (four times a year for seven weeks total). I guess we should also consider that since this is a chunk of time it will also affect other aspects of our regular budgeting (i.e. groceries, etc.).
I’ll also be receiving per diem while I’m on travel (50% of the time) that haven’t been included in these projections. I’m hoping to pocket what I can and use this towards R&R expenses.
We’ll keep you post once we have a better sense of what our final budget works out to be. I imagine we should have some good numbers to work with by the end of the year.
Cheers,
Miel
