Monday Night Money?

I just realized, that I need to backtrack a bit. A while ago, I referred to "Monday Night Money," and I've been calling some of my posts "Monday Night Money," but I never explained what it really is. A few years ago, I got connected with a website called FlyLady. FlyLady has this whole website and system of email reminders, etc that help many people organized themselves and their lives. But it's more than that. She encourages people to do things that show that you Finally Love Yourself (one of the things that the "Fly" in FlyLady is supposed to stand for). Without getting into too many details (you can find those on her website) she has a lot of really good stuff and says a lot of things that make sense. I just found that I was overwhelmed with trying to do all of her system, but I have kept some parts that worked for me. One of these things is to designate one day per week for doing certain things. For me, this translates into "Monday Night Money". Every Monday night, I get the computer and the desk for the evening to work on "money". I will pull out the stack of bills that we have gotten in the mail this week (I'm getting better about putting them in one place so that this is easier). After gathering the bills, I will pull out my budget sheet/ calendar for the month and enter any information from the bills (actual expenses and due dates) and subtract the difference between the "expected" amounts and the "actual" amounts. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not. Also, since I have the computer for the evening, I can come on here and write to all of you lovely people, post my "check-in", and do any other money-related stuff that I need to do on the computer. So, there you have it in a nutshell. That's my "Monday Night Money" plan. All in all, it's not very time consuming (I get started after the kids are in bed), unless I end up surfing online for a while. The part that should be painful and time consuming- the dreaded "B" word (Budgeting)-is actually quite quick and painless