Day to Day budgeting - your tips please!

In our house, I run the 'virtual savings' PMS speadsheets and other half runs the budget spreadsheets.

I give him all my receipts plus details of non-receipt items (e.g. spends at the car boot sale).

He records spend in columns - food and cleaning, fuel, gardening and other (slow cooker purchases etc). We are logging our gardening start up costs just for interest.

As we make savings from BOGOF's etc I record these in the virtual savings spreadsheet. I record these monthly and with last month's PMS I bought a slow cooker.

We have also started thinking laterally. We have been promising our daughters some proper beds for a while - they are using teen high beds with sofa's beneath. They are super duper quality but not really suitable for an older teenager. So last weekend we gave up trying to sell them and simply chopped them down (repacing the plastic feet on the lowered beds). Result - new beds that didn't cost us a penny. We have a assumed a virutal saving of £200.

As part of the budget spreadsheet (described above) we have a running average monthly spend as well as a weekly spend total. We are consistently working this figure downwards thanks to the great ideas on MSE.

Thanks to all those who mentionedMS Money. It rang some bells and I realised it was another unused programme i already have on my pc.

Its a little weird at first but I've just had a funny hour sorting it out and looing at my virtual protential savings. I'm gointg to be RICH:beer:

Well not so much rich but the potential to have a bank balance in the black for the first time in years. This is all thanks to the superp ideas from all on this forum, and my family's willingness to go along with some ideas. Even my DH is coming up with money saving ideas now and even eating meals that he wasn'y so keen to try before.

His latest idea, as i'm a bit of a fusspot with the washing is to mix a value powder with my usual good powder and a bag of washing soda. This means that two small boxes of powder noe last me 3 weeks and I have 4 kids. The powder mix with the soda actually gets the washing much cleaner with ledss powder. Now if I can only bring myself to use the vinegar as a softener.......................

I put stuff just on a list on Excel as I buy it.. then every week i add the things up from different catagories to check i'm in my budget (obviously I have an idea as the week goes on)

I don't have any regular bills etc coming out my account so I don't have to worry about that. I check my acct with internet banking at least every few days to check I've had wages paid/when debits have gone through etc and move money to or from my savings as needed. I use cash almost exclusively - I only use a card if I don't have neough cash on me, for internet buying etc..

I don't use a financial package at all. I have an Excel workbook which does everything, which I update almost daily.

1. Main sheet. This lists: Current balance of each account/CC; Current uncleared items on each account/CC; Money owed to/from friends; money/cheques waiting to be paid in; current balance of each "budget pot" including savings (expressed as a negative figure); total (which should be £0.00 at all times, since the "pin money" pot got added to the list!) To the right of this list is a duplicate list of the fixed monthly addition to each budget, which adds up to exactly the amount of my monthly salary - so that when I get paid, all I have to do is copy it across and do "Paste Special: Values: Add" to update the main list.

2. Account sheets. One for each bank account and credit card. Gets reconciled against the bank statement

3. Budget-pot sheets. So I know what's been paid and where it's come from.

It lets me be very flexible with my money - e.g. I know I've got £2.5k in actual savings, but my savings accounts can be fuller or emptier than this depending on the cashflow situation at any given time of year. The idea is that as long as it adds up at year end, which it always does, I don't really care what is being kept where in the meantime as long as I'm not paying interest to anybody, and the maximum number of people are paying interest to me

The sheets aren't all linked together as well as they could be (still a lot of manual stuff going on) but I just need to get around to doing this.

Nix143 wrote:

Hi guys this is all really inspiring stuff, thanks very much

Next thing is on a day to day basis what little tricks do you use to stop yourself spending money? Or to monitor the money you spend?

Well, I just have (for example) a pocket money budget of £30p/w which I withdraw in cash on Sunday. This is for concert programmes (my main extravagance, but yes I do refer to them afterwards), newspapers, magazines, sweets, any minor train fares on top of my annual season ticket, takeaway breakfast and lunch (a once-weekly treat), beer money, takeaways, snacks if I'm going out straight from work and have to eat, etc etc etc.

At the start of the week I work out the likely expenditure on each (and I normally look 4 weeks ahead so if there's a heavy week and a light week I can juggle funds between one and the other) and end up with a remainder figure of anything from -£10 to £20 (hence the juggling) depending on the week. Then I know what I've got, and if it isn't there, I don't spend it. If I need more for something, I might forgo my Sunday takeaway breakfast for example.

Some people on these message boards find it easier to control their money if they have a fixed cash amount like this. But for everything else, as long as you're not the sort of person who thinks that paying by plastic isn't real money :eek: :eek: , I reckon it's definitely better not to use cash for anything other than miscellaneous items if you can help it. Think about it - if you withdraw £10 from the cashpoint and spend £8.50 on groceries, it's easy to write off the change as extra spending money. Using cards makes it easier to keep track of every penny.