Budget. A Dirty Word for Plan

No one wants to talk about budgeting. How to budget. What is or is not in your budget. Or how to budget. But yet, everyone is on a budget. There is only so much money you can spend weekly or bi-week. Important thing to remember:  Budgets are not built in a day. They are drafts that are rewritten as things happen, and as you learn more, as things change.

When I started doing research in how to make a budget, one website suggested taking a month and listing what you spend.  As I went out and did things, I listed in an excel sheet the date, how much and where I spent money. I learned that I go out a lot. I do online shopping at weird hours of the night. And most of all, I waste money.  

So at the end of the month of listing my money I opened a new excel sheet and  I started listing out monthly bills, how much they are, what day they need to be paid on. How many credit cards to I really have? What is my balance? Am I behind? And the more I put on this spread sheet the more I realized that Budget is a dirty word for Plan. 

Since I am currently being paid on a weekly basis. I have my budget planned out weekly from Mid January to the end of April. I decided to plan it out for 4 months because this way I could see when things are paid off, when I can pay more off, and what weeks different bills come due. I like being able to look at my budget and see when my three student loans land on different weeks. Excel lets me change things depending on how much is needed, what takes priority and to color code if I see fit. 

To take the shock off of some of my larger bills I break the payments up. My cell phone bill is $100 a month.  So I use the bill pay feature from my bank to pay $25 a week.  Some of you are probably thinking “wait some months have 5 weeks so won’t you get a head of your payments?” Yes. There are months where my cell phone bill is much less then what it should be because I’ve “prepaid.”  When I get too far ahead I stop auto pay and put that money to savings.

I suggest using a spread sheet when you start planning and to break things up into categories. You can use this template to get started. When you go through your monthly expenses feel free to add or take away rows as needed to get all your expenses represented. 

In this template I listed savings both general savings that includes, travel savings, saving for college/grad school and under cars I have “saving for car repairs/oil changes.” I listed this under Cars Category as a reminder to plan for when your car breaks. A $75 battery can be budgeted around making it tight for a week or two but $600 new tires are easier to handle if you saved for it. Because your battery will die when it is cold/rainy/snowing/when you do not have time for it. It is really important to save for these things.

The professionals say that it is important to set money aside while paying off your current debt because if something happens (knock on wood), you do not have to make new charges on credit cards that you are trying pay down.  Even if $5.00 a week is all you can do, $5.00 adds up. Try to put something away each week for the future.