Colophon

This page describes how the site is made. There is an explanation of the budget itself elsewhere.

How an issue gets made

On the first Sunday of the month the spreadsheet is reconciled against two bank statements, which takes about forty minutes and is the only part of this that feels like work. The twelve figures come out of that. The notes are written the same afternoon while the reasons are still available; a variance explained three weeks later is a variance invented.

Then the page is typed. There is no publishing system here — the pages are written in a text editor, the numbers are copied across by hand, and the totals in the tables are added up twice, once by the spreadsheet and once by whoever is not typing. That second pass is why the footer of every page names two people.

Why the archive starts at issue 9

Issues 1 through 8 were a paper notebook, one page a month, ruled in pencil, and they are not going to be transcribed. They were also not very good: three of the eight months are missing a category entirely and one is illegible. The notebook still exists in a drawer and is the reason the tables on this site are shaped the way they are.

What this site does not have

• No newsletterBecause that would mean holding a list of other people's addresses, and we do not want the responsibility. The site posts in the first week of every month, which is as much of a schedule as we can offer.
• No commentsThe two times we have wanted outside input we asked someone directly. A comment box on a page containing our actual household income is a different proposition.
• No affiliate links and no sponsorshipNot a moral position, a practical one: the moment a budgeting site earns money from the things it recommends, the ledger stops being evidence. There is nothing to buy here and nothing to click.
• No adviceThis is one household's arithmetic in one city with one particular set of circumstances, the largest of which is a car with no payment on it. Almost none of it generalises and we would rather not pretend otherwise.

Corrections

Errors are fixed on the page where they appear and noted in the following month's issue, in the notes, at the point the number appears rather than in a footnote. Two corrections have been made so far: a transposed grocery figure in issue 9 that read $721 instead of $712, and a sinking‑fund balance in issue 10 that had not been reduced by a cleared payment. Both were found by the second pass described above, after publication rather than before it.

Typography and build

Set in whatever serif the reader's system provides, with figures in a monospace so that the columns line up when they are read down rather than across. No web fonts, no images except a favicon, no tracking of any kind and nothing loaded from anywhere else. The stylesheet is one file and it is shorter than this page.