A big part of the financial picture is income. My father used to say 'its better to make your income bigger than your budget than to try to make your budget match your income'. I got a lot of great financial advice from my dad.

Tracking my income is a bit tricky. I have several sources. I think for now I will just focus on income from salary. And just on 'take home', which isn't even 'net' because retirement has been taken out. But its what actually gets deposited into the bank account for me to use.

There are 3 sources (2 of mine, 1 of K) and they all get paid differently.

Me
$1,468 - every 2 weeks - $38,183/year, $3,182/month
$1,741 - twice a month - $41,788/year, $3,482/month
$1,000/month (consulting, not guaranteed past spring 2012)

K
$2102 - twice a month - $50,461/year, $4205/month

Total (not including consulting)
$10,870 per month, $130,432 /year

Timing for mortgage payments has been an issues (partly because I never wrote it out like this and thought about it, this blog has been helpful). Mortgage is $2600/month (includes $600 in taxes) and none of the income is enough to cover the entire payment. So I have a savings account that I use. I need to re evaluate how to use it, I should be deducting the full mortgage from paychecks I don't need for other bills. (first i need to study the other bills timing..) And I should study when the automatic savings gets taken out, they should correspond to income (some were set up with other income structures or just willy nilly - $25/week sort of thing).

... I started a to do page so I can keep track of all the things I think about when I blog. When I started this I was wondering what I would do once I wrote all my initial posts, and so far each post seems to end with things I need to do. Little bit each day. I have the rest of my life to work on it.