Moving along....Main Budget

By: Unknown on 12:00 PM

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Did anyone else get a shock when they added up their bills for the year?  I did (smile).  It was an eye opener I must say.

Once that was done I got to move on to the actual budget itself - allocating every dollar.

This was a little tricky when I was trying to work out how much each category should have.  The bills category though is taken care of, if you followed my post HERE you will know what I did to reach that.

Everyone's budget will be different, if you have children, or no children, if you have medical expenses,  single, married and so on.  

Here is a very, very basic budget which started me off. I probably used it for about 2 weeks then I had to go deeper, this just didn't work for me.

Notice the old fashioned pen and paper ha ha ha, hubby made me a spreadsheet recently, but I still use this hand written way!

This below is my new budget that I use every single fortnight.  It really doesn't need to be anything fancy or expensive, a pad of paper and a pen does the job!

You will notice that we don't have a category for credit cards.  We no longer have credit card debt,  we cut our limit on the one card to $500, We still don't use it, once we have saved just a little more we will cut that up and continue to ONLY use cash.

 FORMULA

We list our income at the top.

For each category we add the amount we need to cover each category.

Once listed we then minus the categories from our income.

This should result in a Zero balance.

BUT IT DIDN'T

   Our balance wasn't zero,  it was time to go back to each category.

This is where we fine tuned our budget. We took out things that weren't necessities.

You will notice there is no Entertainment category here.  We very rarely went out, well we hadn't since May last year, its starting to get easier so that category can now be added back in.  But it was a choice we had to make, so that was the first thing to go

Secondly was our food budget.  We culled that right back.  I will do a post on how I keep my food budget at $100 per week a bit later.

So you get the picture, wherever we could make cuts we did,  until we got that balance at zero.

Other things you can do:
Renegotiate Utilities, phone plans, cut foxtel and so on...

Next came  the hard part came - sticking to it.  It was probably the hardest part of it all, especially at the start.  We said no to a lot of things, but we got through it and while our budget is still tight, its tight by choice as we save.

I will be back tomorrow with how I sort my fortnightly budget using an envelope system.

Chat soon

Melissa