Savings & Budgeting

As I’ve already expressed, your entire year is not just one month multiplied times 12. Your year is full of different events and one-time events that can greatly influence your money. The next step is to capture all those things in your 12-month snapshot. Here are a few to start with: … [Read more...] about How to Budget – Step 4 – Add In Those Special Times

Now here is where your budget will become far more advanced than everyone else’s: • Copy your one-month column 12 times so that you cover all 12 months! Yes, our budget is going to go for the whole year.   What’s Wrong With One-Month Budgets? Lots: … [Read more...] about How to Budget – Step 3 – Take It All The Way to 12 Months

Take that list of your major expenses you created in Step 1 and list them for one month. Create one column and put your rows of expenses near the bottom half of the page. Income Now let’s go up to the top of the column. This is where we will list your income for the month. For most of us, that will simply be your paychecks and your spouse’s paychecks. Congratulations if you have other significant forms of income. Some examples might be: … [Read more...] about How to Budget – Step 2 – Income Vs Expense

THIS IS NOT going to be one of those “how-to” examples where you’re told to record ever purchase you’ve ever made. Doing that accomplishes NOTHING but wasting a lot of time. Besides, Mint.com can already do this for you automatically. I’ll have more on that later in this series. Instead, look back through your checkbook from the past few months. What were your MAJOR expenses? Make a list of them. I highly recommend using Microsoft Excel if possible. And yes, there will be a link to the template we create throughout this series at the end. Here are a few examples: … [Read more...] about How to Budget – Step 1 – Where Does All My Money Go?