Thursday, July 5, 2007

Budget Planner

Budgeting as always been a struggle for me. I always associated the budgeting process to be associated with being poor or those that can’t handle their money – that attitude changed when I moved out of home and left mom and dad. Well guess what, when you get married, start a family and run a household you feel poor. The bills never stop and the expenses can run out of hand if you don’t make an effort to manage them.

My key problem has been out of site out of mind. For example when we were DINK (double income no kids) and both earning well, I used the credit card without even a thought of the ever increasing debt balance. When the credit card bill arrived it wasn’t a problem to pay the outstanding amount.

That had to change of course as our lives changed and we needed to budget. We’ll there was a slight problem – I actually didn’t know how. We’ll after some tears and some patient explaining by hubby that budgeting did not mean the end of our lives, we sat down and listed all our expenses and income. We broke it all down in weekly chunks so we could determine when the expenses fell due and when our income was received.

There were quite a few items so I knew I needed to list them or type into a spreadsheet. Hubby created a simple and wonderful spreadsheet that I can easily use and displays on one page our complete budget. If you want to use it you can download Mom’s Finance Budget Planner. It is very easy to use and has some conversion calculators built-in.