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.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Budgeting is always important. In my day-to-day job as an executive in a marketing & advertising agency, stretch the client's limited budget the maximum is a continuous challenge. I kept an expense log since working but I stopped doing for the last few years. After reading 2 books, "The Richest Man in Babylon" and "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind" made me started an expense log again. The latter suggested that one's income can be divided and spent in the following ways:
-10% investment
-10% play
-10% long term saving for spending
-10% education (ie constant upgrading for yourself thr books/seminars)
-10% charities
-50 necessities

I'm working towards that. You have an interesting theme and I'll visit more regularly. Cheers.

Mandy said...

Thanks so much for the budgeting spreadsheet. I've been searching for SOMETHING to help me budget better. I definitely struggle with the out-of-sight, out-of-mind issue, as well. If I quickly throw the receipt away I don't realize what all I've bought until the credit card bills comes in...YIKES! And with our first child due in December, I've got to learn to budget NOW!

Anonymous said...

visiting & reading...