One of my action items for today is to create my personal budget plan. I find myself at the end of every week wondering where all of my money went, and our goal right now is to buy a house. We have relatively no bills right now but we still have more month than the end of our money. I like nice things, and I refuse to live that way, so I am going to be working on a plan that gets us to where we need to be!
I started by doing some research via google. From my searching, I found some great tips and a downloadable personal budget sheet from Bank of America. It starts off looking like this:
| Household Budget Worksheet | ||
| Enter your estimated monthly income and expenses to better understand what changes you should make to live within a budget that works best for you. | ||
| If desired, insert new rows to include new income sources or expenses, but do not enter any information in the blue rows. These cells hold the formulas behind the chart. | ||
| PART 1: MONTHLY INCOME | Estimated | Actual |
| Person #1: List monthly income for all full & part time jobs | $3,000.00 | $3,000.00 |
| Person #2: List monthly income for all full & part time jobs | $1,000.00 | $1,000.00 |
| Person #1: Unemployment Insurance (if applicable ) | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Person #2: Unemployment Insurance (if applicable ) | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Other: Child Support | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Other: Tax Credits | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Other: Incoming Rent for rental property | $1,000.00 | $1,000.00 |
| Other: List other income you’d like to track | $500.00 | $500.00 |
| TOTALS (Automatically Calculated) | $5,500.00 | $5,500.00 |
**Side note: These are not my personal budget numbers, these are the numbers that are automatically entered and you change them to reflect your own personal numbers.
Coincidentally, I called USAA this afternoon to find out what the cost for coverage would be to combine my and my husbands car insurance policies, since he has always used state farm. The super nice lady that i spoke with told me that USAA offers FREE financial advising services and transferred me to that department. I talked with this excellent guy named Eric for 35 minutes about what bills we have currently and about how we should have one bank account that pays all of our bills.
He also told me that we should save to have 6 months of our expenses saved for an emergency fund. Why didn’t I think of that sooner?
What he has me doing for this month is recording every single thing that I spend, on a spread sheet, and saving the receipt so that I can see where all of our money goes. This is where I am going to start. I am actually going to have two different tracking sheets because I expense a lot of food and mileage for work.
Credit Card Advice || Avoid carrying over 25% – 30% of the balance for every month because what happens credit report agencies will see the high balance carry over. It is better to pay them off every month because it shows that you have credit responsibility. If you have $50.00 roll over every month then you are in the safe zone, but get in the habit of paying off what you spend each and every month.
thislifeisyourstocreate 