Budgets Made Easy

There is an important lesson that took me into adulthood to learn: making and sticking to a budget.  I have been using this easy budget method for years.  It takes very little time each week to pay bills and I know weeks in advance what our financial standing is.  This is not something they teach kids in school, but I believe it should be.  It is also the first step in learning to save.

1.  Make a list of recurring monthly bills and their due dates.

2.  Make a list of each payday for a month (for us and most people this would be every Friday) and how much your paychecks are for each.

3.  Decide how much can be spent each payday on bills and how much money "living" for the week requires (including gas, food, entertainment and misc items)

4.  Begin adding to each week the bills that are due then and how much they are until you reach your maximum "bill" money for that week.  Do this for each week.  Any bills left without specific due dates can be added to a week that has bill funds available.

5.  There may be weeks with extra funds available after all the bills have a place in the budget.  In this case, I put those funds in our savings.  I also put extra monies including bonuses into the savings even if it is $25 or $50.  Before you know it this adds up quick!  It is much easier for me to keep an index card in the back of my checkbook marked "savings" that I keep track of that money and don't actually have to transfer it to a savings account.  If I actually had to transfer it, I probably wouldn't do it half of the time.  Our savings would be much smaller than it is. 

At the beginning of each month I make my list of bills and income and decide where they all go.  This way I know ahead of time if we will have extra money at a certain time of the month or not.  For the most part it stays the same from month to month with variations only for sporadic things like budgeting for property taxes or vacations or similar other things that don't occur every month.

This makes it very easy each week to sit down and reconcile the checkbook online and quickly pay the week's bills without having to decide each week what to pay!  It also makes it easier to have a budget that we can stick to.  Even when an unexpected expense comes up I can usually rearrange our budget a little or use some of the "savings" money from the index card I keep in the back (money that is actually in our checking account but separate so it is not spent!)

Budgeting can be easy!