Planning a budget

Here we will discuss few tips on how you can plan your budget.

Understand and estimate your current spending patterns: Track your monthly spending and try to account for every dollar spent. For the next month or two, think very closely about how your money is spent. Every time you buy something, pay a bill, or dispose of any of your money, make a strong mental note of what it is being spent on. Better yet, at the end of each day write down a list of each expenditure and what it was used for on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet.

Create your current budget: Now it's time to create your current family or personal budget budget. To do this, you need to quantify all of the spending patterns you observed in step one. Start by downloading our rather detailed Free Excel budget template spreadsheet or go to our browser based sample budget (a very simplified version). If you use the Excel spreadsheet you'll have to know how to use Excel well enough to tweak the formulas yourself. After downloading the personal household budget template, proceed to fill in the cells by classifying all the money you currently spend into the appropriate categories.