We Need a Budget To Stop Us Coasting

Keeping_Motivated

Hi

I couldn't decide which board to post this on as I need to deal with all areas of our finances so I guess we could come under many boards but I want to have a place to track it all. If this isn't the right place let me know and I will ask for it to be moved appropriately.

My aim as the title says is to stop coasting. We are not in a bad place financially and certainly seem to have a lot of surplus income each month but as we don't have a budget for everything or a clear plan for the future I don't believe we are achieving what we could with our money.

Areas I need to look at and budget and plan for:

Mortgage: I will add the figures later when I have checked them out.

Savings: We do have some savings again I will add later.

Endowment: We have an endowment maturing this year will add figures/dates later.

Pensions: These are terrible I am absolutely clueless so need to look into figures and what we need to do to get on track.


I like the idea of starting tracing a budget for everything on my iphone but would need one that is in sync with my husbands phone too so we can both update it. Does anyone have any app recommendations?

getmore4less

DO a one year plan,

Start with the historic reality of where all your money went in a year.

Then total up all the income for the next year and allocate it to where you want to spend it, use the historic record as a guide as that will eb the staring point for where the money will go if you tend to do nothing.

keep going till you have every penny allocated to a job.

then you can track the progress.

prioritise if you are not happy with the allocations but the net result stays zero, wahn to pay more on the mortgage decide where that is coming from, cheaper holiday cheaper food going out less, cheaper car.

you can then add longer term goals like pay the mortgage off buy a new car retire early etc. these will need 5 and 10 year plans but the real spends will be estimates, you can adjust like add 5% to electric bill to make that a more realistic estimate.


do everything on annual total as that normalizes and give a better comparison to spends at different schedules.

eg £2 a work day on a coffee is £450py thats an extra holiday.


the best tool out there is still MS MONEY for budget/planning and tracking.

if you have a plan you don't need to have a app you know how much you have to spend on things and can do the tracking as a joint activity to check the plan.


A lot of people start with the SOA format as that is easy and gives a monthly breakdown of the plan.

A lot of people know it and can comment on ideas to save day to day.

http://www.stoozing.com/calculator/soa.php


Where most people go wrong is they don't know where there money goes, the last 12 months exercise is a good one can you account for every penny from the 1 July 2016 to 30 June 2017

Try doing a SOA for that period(add categories if needed) and get the money left over to zero.