How to Work Out a Budget and Stick to It!

Working out a budget for your bills is easy. Working out a budget for everything else seems nearly impossible. I mean, how can you say that you will only spend on fruit and vegetables when they are sold by weights? To do this, you would have to carry a calculator with you when you went shopping and weigh everything before you bought it. This is beside the fact that the price of food seems to be continually on the rise. The same can be said for petrol. If you use 20 litres a week, what do you do when the price changes? You would need to rearrange your whole budget.

The solution to this problem is to budget for the most you think you would spend on these items. This way, if you don't spend as much, you will have saved money that you can then put away for emergencies.

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So how do you create your budget in the first place? Many people will tell you to start by writing down everything you spend money on for the next month. What if you want to start your budget now, instead of in a month's time? Also if you have bills that only come every three or six months or even yearly, they won't be included if you work out your budget from just one month of spending.

Let's look at it from a different perspective. The first thing I look at is my regular bills. Things like rent, electricity, phone, insurance, car registration, loan repayments etc. These are all regular bills that need to be paid on time and are generally about the same amount each bill cycle. Therefore, the first step is to write down all of these bills and how much you will have to pay. The next step is to work out a yearly figure for each bill. For those bills that come monthly, you multiply the amount by 12. For three monthly bills, multiply by four and six monthly bills are multiplied by two. Then we need to work out how much these bills will cost us each pay period. If you are paid weekly, you would divide the yearly amount by 52. If you are paid fortnightly, you would divide by 26 and if you are paid monthly, you would divide by 12. This gives you the amount you need to budget for each pay period. The remainder of your pay is then used for food, petrol, normal living expenses and savings. Most people have a general idea on how much they pay each week for these items so that amount is used for your budget.

Now that we have our budget, how do we make sure that we stick to it? The first step is to make sure that our bill money that we are budgeting for is not left in our everyday bank account. The temptation to spend can be too great if the money is easily accessed. I heard about a system a few years ago where you get yourself a folder with plastic sheet protectors in it and have one for each of your bills. Then each week you put your budgeted amount of money into the relevant pockets so that when the bill comes in you just pull out the cash and pay it. The one big flaw with this system is that you end up with a lot of cash in your house. There is nothing to stop you from "borrowing" from your bill money and there is also the risk of having it stolen.

I recommend that you set up a separate bank account for your bill money. This account would ideally not come with an eftpos card but be accessed by telephone and internet banking. Most bills can be paid by bpay so when your bills come in you can pay them directly out of your bill saving account.

How to Work Out a Budget and Stick to It!

Glenda Lange is a bookkeeper with 21 years experience and a Certificate in Commerce from USQ. She is the author of Beginners Guide to Basic Bookkeeping [http://www.glendasfreesite.com.au/gbs] for Small Business and the owner of [http://www.glendasfreesite.com.au]

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