This is part two of a four part series on holiday budgeting. Part 1, Eight Ways to Save Money for Christmas for tips on finding cash to fill out your budget.
The key to successful holiday spending debt-free is knowing how much you have to spend and carefully allocating those dollars to the things you most want to do or give. Use these four steps to plan an accurate, affordable, and pleasing holiday budget.
Open your closet door. What do you see? A favorite dress, some nice shirts, your shoes, a few random items you shoved in there to get out of the way, and a few items that don t really fit or you don t really like but they ve just been hanging there so long you re used to them? That s what my closet looks like anyway or it did until I cleaned it out for cash.
The best way to avoid those hefty January credit card bills, give the Christmas gifts you really want to give, and enjoy some of the fun (but sometimes costly) activities that happen in December, is to save for the Christmas season early. With a little discipline, by December, you can have a slush fund to draw from for holiday expenses.
With credit cards accepted almost everywhere these days, it s easy to just pay with plastic and never exchange bills and coins. Just swipe, sign, and go. You don t even have to think about it.
But that s the problem.
Here s a real quick and simple budget tip: Don t Buy Books. Ever.
People keep referencing the kitchen table budgeting that our country needs to do to stop deficit spending. In that vein, I decided to see what the Federal budget that was just passed would look like in BudgetSimple:
As we roll over to a new year, it s not only interesting to look at the past year, but crucial for figuring out our budget for the current year. At the end of every fiscal year, corporations look at how money was spent and allocated from the previous year to set budgets for the next year, and I don t think a family s budget should be treated any different.
This is part 2 of an ongoing series of posts about how to use BudgetSimple to manage your budget. Please read part 1 first.
In our first example we ended up the month over budget. I suspect this is the most common reality of people s first month in BudgetSimple. If you are under budget, great! Put the extra money in savings, or pay down a credit card. But the trickier question is what do we do when you are over budget.
Welcome! So you probably ended up here because you were looking for a free online budget. Congratulations, you have found one, but now what?
