Now is a great time to review your 2006 expenses and make adjustments to your Budget/Spending Plan for 2007.  The way we do this is to use our Quicken Finance Program.  We run two reports and print them.  The first one is the 2006 Income/Expense Report.  This lists each category of income or expense for 2006 and is just a total for each category.  The second report is one for 2006 by itemized categories.  This breaks down each category of expenses by dollars actually spent.  We can easily review every expense and see where adjustments are needed, where we need to plan differently, and where we need to change our spending habits.  After we both sit down and review these reports, we then make decisions where the changes need to be made.  It is a good idea to review your budget more often when you are first starting out.  You may need to adjust your budget every month until it works the way you want.  We review our budget only a few times during the year and make adjustments where needed. 

When we ran our reports, the preliminary review shows that nearly every expense in our budget (except for our mortage which is a fixed rate) has increased.  We are going to be reviewing each of these increases to find out the reason (although most of them we already knew about) and brainstorming solutions to the increases.