Budget Simple

How to use

The basic idea behind a budget is to figure out exactly where your money is going. There are two parts to this.

First at the beginning of the month, you make a plan of where your money should be spent during the month. This plan should be perfectly balanced, your expenses should be exactly what your income is. If your expenses are over your income, you've made a plan that cannot be sustained and you need to find some expenses that can be cut out (or earn more income). If your expenses are planned to be less then your income, you have a surplus and that should ideally go into savings or some other investment.

Once you have a plan for the month, the second part of a budget is entering actual expenses whenever you spent them. So if you've budgeted $500 for groceries, and you actually only spend $300 for the month, you are under your budget, and this is good! If you find that you are consistently going over your budget in certain categories, it probably means your goal is unrealistic and you should up the budget for that category in the next month. Also you could end up having lots of "unbudgeted" expenses. This is typically where we find out why we never have any money. The little things like coffee here and there, or a car repair, etc... You should ideally have very few unbudgeted expenses.

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