Hond Financial

Creating a household budget needs to be one of the first steps in any plan to take control of your spending and financial situation. The basic idea for a monthly budget is to work out how much money you have in comings versus what is being spent and how you are spending it. Now you are armed with all the information it’s time to make some changes to reach your goals.

Follow these simple step by step instructions to creating a budget for your household.

1: Calculate Your Incomings: This should be quite simple. You need to calculate your typical incomings per month such as pay checks (after tax), bonuses and dividends from any investments. If there are some payments you only get once or twice a year such as bonuses then average that figure out over a year to give you a typical month.

2: Calculate Your Outgoings: Calculating your outgoings is a little bit more complicated as you spend money in far more ways than you earn it. Go over your statements for your bank account and credit cards for the past few months and figure out how much you have in outgoings each month and where it is going. Credit and debit card transactions may be easier to keep tabs on but it’s hard to see where cash withdrawn from ATM’s has ended up. It may be a good idea to keep a spending diary with you for a couple of weeks to take note of all your cash spending. Hopefully you will find your typical outgoings are lower than your incomings but often this is not the case. You may be surprised to find your outgoings are higher than you incomings which means you will be going deeper into debt each month which is not sustainable.

3. Classify Your Outgoings: Once you have worked out all your outgoings it makes sense to classify them together into categories such as groceries, utilities, clothes, entertainment, loan repayments, travel and so on. By grouping your expenses you’ll quickly see the areas that are sucking up most of your money.

4: Sort out the essentials, the nice to haves and the not required: Now you can see where your money is going then you need to decide what can be changed. There may be some expenses on there that you feel cannot be changed such as rent or mortgage payments, insurances and so on. If you need to make large cutbacks then perhaps even these items could be reduced by downsizing your home. Assuming however that you are not looking for such drastic measures then you need to find other places to make changes. Perhaps you could switch your broadband, cell phone and landline phone deals to a more optimal plan, you could switch to a cheaper pay TV package or get rid of it all together. Common areas for cutbacks are reducing your entertainment and shopping expenses for items such as dining out, buying music, clothes and so on.

5: Make Goals: You should now have figured out what you are spending and where you can make cut backs. You shouldn’t be aiming to create a budget just to survice on; you should be looking to have spare money to increase your net worth each month. Two ways in which this could be done is by reducing debts or increasing your savings. If you are in debt then the goal should be to get out of debt as soon as possible. Set goals for how much you want to pay off per month and build this into your budget. Once you have paid off debts then the focus can become on saving money each month via a high interest savings account. High interest savings account products have high interest rates and accumulate quickly when you make regular monthly deposits. You should make it a goal to increase your net worth each month by either reducing your debts or boost your savings so you have money saved for unexpected expenses or to purchase large items debt free. There are many other options for extra money in your budget such as investments in shares and so on.

6: Keep Yourself in Check: Make sure you keep reviewing your budget and looking for areas where you can make further trimmings and savings. Don’t forget that a budget is not just about managing to get from one pay check to the next but should be a long term plan to improve your financial wellbeing.

Article provided thanks to www.compareyourbank.com.au a consumer finance comparison site including online savings accounts. Products can be compared side by side looking at comparable features before making an application online.

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