September was our first month of having combined finances, and all I can say is that I’m not sure what all of the fuss is about. Combining finances was actually pretty easy and definitely makes our finances simpler. We don’t have to worry about any expenses “being equal” and I like having an entire snapshot of our financial standing as opposed to knowing only “mine.”

September Personal Balance Sheet

I’ve gone back and broken out our wedding savings from the beginning to make it easy to track within the balance sheet. Last month I added a liability equal to our wedding savings so that we can more accurately assess our net worth since nothing spent on the wedding will become an asset of any time. I view saving for a computer, car, Roth IRA or house to be inherently different because when the cash is spent, we’ll have an asset to show for it. In the case of the wedding, the money is spent on one day and there is no asset received in return. This is why this savings is being netted out by a liability and others are not. This netting was only started last month, I won’t be restating any old balance sheets because I prefer to keep any changes prospective.

I haven’t done a great job of keeping up with the blog over the last month because I was simply swamped with other work. Hopefully I can pick things back up a bit in October because I love writing. We also didn’t make specific contributions to our savings accounts during the month. While we were living with combined finances during the month, my fiance didn’t receive her first paycheck until the end of September. So we had a bit of a cash-crunch during the month and we weren’t able to make specific savings contributions. That means that October should see us knock out some of our remaining goals for the year. I’m exciting to be making a lot of progress toward these goals and can’t wait to get past the wedding savings so that we can start our house fund.