If you’ve been following along with our blog you should have already created a budget. If you haven’t had time to do that yet (if you have this will be even easier), I encourage you to do the following.
1. Gather your bills that you’ve gotten over the past month.
2. Create columns in a spreadsheet or on a sheet of paper. You can use any headings that you wish. What you want to do is to categorize your expenses. These are the columns that we used.
Utilities - House - Car - Entertainment - Food - Insurance - Medical - Home Repairs / Supplies - Childcare - Clothing - Taxes - Credit Cards - Interest - Gas - Home Improvement - Travel - Clothing - Misc.
I would also recommend creating sub sections for each of the categories… so for “House” you could have payments, insurance, taxes, etc.
2. Use the spreadsheet (or a piece of paper) and include everything that you’ve spent money on in the past month.
During the next months we’ll take each of the categories that we’ve listed and start talking about some ways that you can save money.
There is a very helpful budget spreadsheet that I found today - you can check that out here (note it is an excel spreadsheet file).
http://www.free-financial-advice.net/budget.xls
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }