Personal Budgeting

“Making ends meet” is something you have heard more than a handful of times. It’s a common saying like, “living pay check from pay check”. These are sayings from people who have no finance plans. They have not stopped and thought up any strategies in order to pay off their debts, start saving some money and/or paying for future expenses. This is what a personal budget is. It’s a financial plan. In this article, we will be looking at different types of budgeting tools (i.e. money management software, websites and the trusty old pencil and paper), important concepts, and a sample budget.

Budgeting Tools

There are many different budgeting tools you can use when doing your personal budgeting. Today, there are  money management software and websites that allow you to do your personal budgeting in a quick and efficient manner. However, there is always the good old trusted pencil and paper (with a calculator, of course, for those of us who are not mathematically inclined).

There are many money management software products out on the market today that can help us manage our money. Quicken, Fortora Fresh Finance, GnuCash, Microsoft Money, and Moneydance are just a handful of these software products. These products can help you to keep your personal account information (i.e. money market, checking and savings accounts) in order, as well as calculate past expenses and display monthly expenditures. They can also assist you in budgeting for the future.

There are many money management websites that can assist you in managing your personal finances. They offer the same services as the money management software products mentioned earlier. However, you may want to check to see what their privacy policy is, if you don’t want some of your personal information given to other companies.

If you’re concerned about your personal financial information falling into the wrong hands, why not just reach into the drawer and find that calculator and pencil you haven’t used in a while? Now you can use that locking filing cabinet for what it was really meant for. If you don’t have a filing cabinet, you can run down to the dollar store and pick up a three-ringed binder.

Important Concepts

Personal budgeting isn’t that complicated an idea. When you start talking about concepts in personal budgeting people get fidgety and want to disregard the whole process. Here are a few concepts that are to help keep things simple and keep you on the right track towards your finances:

Simplicity. As we just mentioned, keeping things simple is what people like. In terms of your personal budget, don’t get caught up in specifics. For example when it comes to tracking your expenses, you don’t need to keep track of what brand of toilet paper you purchased. Just place it under the toiletries category.

Flexibility is another concept one should familiarize themselves with. If you go over budget in a category one month, it’s not the end of the world. You may need to spend more in that category than you realized. Maybe you can find other categories to cut from. Keep in mind too however, what items you need and what items you merely want. This may help in making those difficult decisions.

When someone starts a personal budget, they generally have a goal, or goals in mind. So it is important not to forget these goals once you’ve begun budgeting. Goals could include: paying off a debt, or debts, building up some savings, or just putting money aside for future expenses.

Sample Budget

Here is a simple example of a budget you could do:



Conclusion

Coming up with a personal budget is something that we are all capable of doing, whether we are computer savvy or not. It is a good way to focus on meeting any financial goals that we might have, like paying off debt, placing money into savings, or even just putting some money aside for future expenses. It will only take a little bit of your time each month and you can feel comfortable in knowing that you have some control in your life.