Board Gaming on a Shoestring

We run a pretty tight ship in my household, with a budget being the mainstay of our operations. Everything we buy gets recorded on our budget ledger, and we carefully monitor our purchases to make sure that at the end of the month, we know where our money has gone. We do this to ensure that our money goes where we want it to go and that we spend less—preferably much less—than we make.

This may seem like a recipe for eliminating all hobbies of any kind, but early on, we recognized that hobbies are a necessary part of life. My favorite part of our budget is the personal spending cash column because it allows each of us to have a small amount of money to do whatever we want with. If I want to spend all my money on Bazooka bubble gum, so be it. If my wife wants to buy more yarn for her knitting projects, that's okay too. (For the record, I don't buy Bazooka gum: I usually buy board games.)