Making Ends Meet

thaliadaniels

Hi there. Just got in here. Just wanna ask some piece of advice from you guys. Can you share with me your budget plan? I mean the way you track down your expenses. As for me, it never worked. Money seems to fly so fast. I wanna start budgeting so we could set aside for our savings.

DCFC79

Many ways it caan be done.

You have your wages paid into account A any bills are taken out eg utilities (you can get an idea of how much these should be but for the winter maybe over sestimate how much they would cost), mobile phone, once they are paid you transfer whats left to account B and you use whats left for food shopping, petrol etc ( could use a credit card for this and have a DD setup).

Use cash for food shopping, you might find you are more wary of is this the best deal.

jonnygee2

I mean the way you track down your expenses.

I use Monzo as my main card. It has a page in the app where you set your budget, overall and for each area, and then it automatically tracks your spending and tells you if you will go over budget in the month ahead.

It works for me because it only takes about 5 minutes a week of admin total.

Thrugelmir

Draw a set amount of cash every week. Discipline yourself that's all you have to spend. Focuses the mind clearly. Every penny counts.

getmore4less

Spending diary of every penny spent update daily.

Then use one of the tools to organise the data

Also write down how you want to spend one years worth of money.
If you use the SOA template that can get you going.

MsMoney is better but takes a bit of effort to set up to get the best from it.

YNAB might work that is designed for people that don't know how to budget properly and struggle with cashflow.

Chappers27

The single best thing I did was to change the dates of my direct debits to come out a couple of days after I got paid. Then I could see what I had left to spend.

Ken68

Categorizing the details is just a part of budgeting.You need to actively stop spending.

Zero_Sum

Get MS Money & track everything

pmduk

Check out the Budget planning section of editorial pages. You might find the spreadsheet handy.