I’m starting a series on home budgets this week and continuing on each Tuesday, to help you set up and maintain a working home budget.
Selecting your categories ~
The first step to establishing a working and successful home budget is to first figure out what categories you will need to include. This will be all income streams and all expenses that you have for you and your family. Typical categories for income would be from your job, interest, child support, etc.. Typical categories for expenses would be: mortgage, phone bill, groceries, electric, eating out, etc… Basically anything that has money coming into your home would be listed as income and anything that has money leaving your home would be an expense.
Write down your categories ~
Whether you choose a piece of paper or a spreadsheet ~ just write your categories out. Organize them in the following manner:
(example)
Income
- job income
- interest income
- child support
Monthly Expenses
- mortgage
- phone
- water
Non-Monthly Expenses
- vet bill
- quarterly water bill
- upcoming gifts
Now that you have your categories set, it’s time to make a column for each pay day. If you get paid once a month, make one column ~ twice a month, two columns ~ etc…
There! You’ve got the outline for your budget (minus the numbers, of course). Next week we’ll be filling in the numbers, so you’ll want to do some information gathering this week. Look at ALL of your expenses that you had in the last year and get good dollar amounts on how much you spent in each category. Try to be as accurate as possible. We’ll use those numbers to create your budget.
Hmmm…maybe I should pass this series on to the govt!!??
See you next Tuesday!
