[ReggieX]

Originally Posted by Hugi

Hey, I'm really getting the hang of this budget-thing.

Your budget sucks! How are you going to pay for pizza?

[Warung]

Originally Posted by zerostar

The only reason I JUST started (a few years ago) was because I would up with over $300K in school bills and family loans that I religiously paid back over those 3 years when I started work.

Please tell me how you did this, - NOW!

[Warung]

Originally Posted by Hugi

[RAILhead]

Originally Posted by Spliff

Any chance you could post a link to a template of your budget? I'm hopeless with Excel's formulas.

You bet -- I'll "clean up" my budget file and make it available later this morning from work -- keep checking back!

Maury

[Mithras]

Great discussion.
My wife and I have a sort of ``beginner's budget", which we started a few months ago. That budget is simply this: each Saturday morning, we each pull out $80 in cash. That cash is all the money we have to spend during the week -- on clothes, food, movies, everything that isn't a fixed bill like the utilities.

If we want to buy something expensive, we simply set aside $20 or $30 or whatever at the start of the week, and accumulate cash for a couple of months until we can buy the item.

The method isn't sophisticated, and it doesn't let us track exactly how much we spend on each of those categories. But it has a couple of advantages:
* Gets us thinking in a `budget' mindset -- do I want to go out to lunch today, if it means I can't save up for some new clothes at the end of the week?
* It's cash, so we feel it. As my wallet gets thinner during the week, I know to pinch corners.
I had tried a debit-card budget, so that I'd know where every expenditure went, but the debit card money didn't feel ``real" and I found it harder to stick to the budget. Cash feels real.

Anyway, I'd suggest something like this for those of you just getting started, in combination with a regular budget like Maury's for the recurring items like savings, rent/mortgage, utilities, etc.

[RAILhead]

Okay, I've cleaned-up my "fancy" budget (the one I use, not the "beginner" budget I usually give to people) and made it available for download. You can get it here:

http://www.railheaddesign.com/downlo...ous/Budget.sit

Let me know if you have any questions,
Maury

[nonhuman]

You compressed it with Stuffit? o_O

[RAILhead]

Originally Posted by nonhuman

You compressed it with Stuffit? o_O

Yep.

But here's a Zip version if someone wants one:

http://www.railheaddesign.com/downlo...ous/Budget.zip

Maury

[nonhuman]

That's what I was looking for, thanks.

[RAILhead]

Originally Posted by davesimondotcom

First off, great topic andi. Second, thank you to Maury for all of the info I've been able to gleen from reading the thread.

I desperately need to start budgeting better (I do it, but not well.) I think I get bogged down in minutia - is the gas expense $29.35 or $29.99? LOL

Here are the challenges in budgeting for our "family" (me and my wife

• I've recently become self-employed and do not have steady income. It comes in at uneven intervals (when clients pay) - which is both a challenge and a reason to budget
• My wife has health issues that cause her prescription bills to be $500/month or more. Not a big deal, considering we meet the deductible in February every year! But still, the reimbursment checks from the insurance come irregularly.
• My wife also has two home-based businesses. She sells Body Shop at Home and also sells handmade jewelry. The Body Shop money is in a seperate account. The jewelry is "fun money."

I'm getting my business going well enough now that I'll actually be making more than I was at my last job soon, but I also need to take a large sum out for taxes in April!

Maury - any help you could give would be greatly appreciated. My email is pretty easy to guess (dave at my username.) PMs work too.

You're in a not-uncommon situation, and all you have to do is work out a monthly cash-flow plan -- a budget -- that lists all the various items you'll have to pay, just like "normal." Any way you slice it, you have to pay mortgage/rent, utilities, and all that regardless of when the money comes in, so go ahead and make a budget of anticipated *monthly* expenses.

Here's where you'd do things differently that others: get another sheet of paper (or spreadsheet, whatever you're using) and make three columns: Item, Amount, Cumulative Amount.

Now look over your budget. We're going to prioritize them by importance, and the way to approach this is to think to yourself "if I only have enough money to pay for ONE thing, what would it be?" Find it, mark it on your budget (so you know that you've already picked it), and write its info on your new sheet under the Item and Amount columns.

Next, think to yourself "if I only have enough money to pay for ONE thing, what would it be?" Find it, mark it on your budget (so you know that you've already picked it), and write its info on your new sheet.

Rinse and repeat until you've marked off everything on your budget, and when you do, you have all your financial NECESSITIES in order of importance. That's key number one: you need to identify true necessities not things that you want to be necessities.

In the Cumulative Amount column, total all the amounts above that line item, all the way down your page like in this little screen shot:



Now, when you get a check for $100, $1000, or $2000 -- or whatever -- you can look at your prioritized list and see where that money needs to go and what all that money can cover. As soon as you can cover it, pay it, and get ready for the next items in your monthly list.

It's a little (a lot) more difficult to maintain because it does require more work, but once you get the hang of it, you'll begin to totally master your money and know *exactly* where every penny goes. Not only that, because you and your wife have prioritized everything, you can rest assured the really important items are taken care of like shelter, food, utilities, etc.

Does that make any sense at all?

Maury

[FulcrumPilot]

Good budgets will help you save money. But one way to save money real fast despite the budget plans, is to open a savings account the deposit the money you were planning to spend on something that you could live without. Its pretty surprising that one can live a life for a short duration at least ver simply. So for example, you want to buy that new ipod? Ok assume that you did and put that 300 odd bucks into that savings account, bam! Just try this for a 3-4 months you will see how effective this is! You can close some cc accounts pretty fast this way as well.

[BRussell]

You da man Railhead!

I want to add that although people are talking about budgeting their bills and spending, I think it's important to budget savings. Don't just budget expenses and then save what's left over. Count your savings as a line item and then actually "spend" it by putting it in an account somewhere. Otherwise you end up treating savings as an afterthought that may or may not happen depending on whether you follow your budget.

[RAILhead]

Originally Posted by BRussell

You da man Railhead!

I want to add that although people are talking about budgeting their bills and spending, I think it's important to budget savings. Don't just budget expenses and then save what's left over. Count your savings as a line item and then actually "spend" it by putting it in an account somewhere. Otherwise you end up treating savings as an afterthought that may or may not happen depending on whether you follow your budget.

YES YES YES!

Savings should be a line item -- thanks for bringing that up. I have it in my downloadable budget, labeled ING Savings. I highly recommend ING Direct if you want a decent return on money for an account that's meant to never be touched for anything but emergencies.

This brings up another issue, too: where to keep money. We keep a small "emergency fund" and our basic savings at our local bank in town. That way, if I ever need the money for an emergency *now*, I can just pop-in and get it. This little emergency fund is kept at right around $5000, and our regular savings is in there, too (like Christmas, taxes, etc.).

We then use our online ING Direct account (if you're interested in setting one up, I can refer you and you'll get $25 and I'll get $10 -- just PM me) for our fully funded emergency fund which holds a minimum of $20,000. Anything over this $20k is just money made on the interest, and we never touch it since it's meant to be there if one of us were to lose our job ($20k can get us by for up to 8 months, easy, with one paycheck, while the other secures a job). This fund is NOT designed to make money, and we only get 3% on it -- but that's a LOT better than what our bank offers.

Other investment savings are, of course, at places like Vanguard and the like.

Maury

[Hugi]

Originally Posted by ReggieX

Your budget sucks! How are you going to pay for pizza?

First rule of financials: Everything you can't afford, you mooch off of your friends .

[von Wrangell]

Just wanted to thank Railhead for the template

[RAILhead]

Originally Posted by von Wrangell

Just wanted to thank Railhead for the template

NP. Let me know if you have any questions.

Maury

[von Wrangell]

Will do.

[von Wrangell]

Just two quick questions.

1. Is there a way to remove the dollar sign(I'm using NeoOffice btw)
2. I get paid monthly. Would it cause any problems with the template(the calculations etc) to remove the second pay period?

[RAILhead]

Originally Posted by von Wrangell

Just two quick questions.

1. Is there a way to remove the dollar sign(I'm using NeoOffice btw)
2. I get paid monthly. Would it cause any problems with the template(the calculations etc) to remove the second pay period?

1. The dollar signs are being displayed because those cells are formatted as currency. I've never used NeoOffice (though I'll download it after this), so I'm not sure you go about adjusting cell formatting.

2. The only thing that will "break" will be the totals in the red summary box. All you'd need to do is modify the formulas in those cells so they only point to the first pay period's cells.

Maury

[von Wrangell]

Originally Posted by RAILhead

1. The dollar signs are being displayed because those cells are formatted as currency. I've never used NeoOffice (though I'll download it after this), so I'm not sure you go about adjusting cell formatting.

2. The only thing that will "break" will be the totals in the red summary box. All you'd need to do is modify the formulas in those cells so they only point to the first pay period's cells.

Maury

I should be able to find the currency settings. Shouldn't be that difficult and I should have found it on my own.

I decided to keep the second part and have that one for my fiancee. We are working in different locations at the moment and she is hauling in a lot more money than I do so I thought it would be better to split the earnings so she can benefit more from the money she is getting at the moment instead of the typical 50/50 split of all money coming in.


Thanks for the quick replies.

[RAILhead]

Wow, NeoOffice changes things a bit -- mostly on the graph, though. But to change the formatting, select the cells with dollar signs and go to Format/Cells and you can change it to whatever you want from there. I don't know what you're wanting to change them to, but that's where you'll do it.

As for the formulas in the red box, remove all the references to any cell in column G and you should be okay.

HTH,
Maury

[von Wrangell]

Thanks again!

[boardsurfer]

Maury, thanks for the template, that must have been a lot of work to get off the ground.

by the way, you left some info in June. Dont know if you care or not.

[Superchicken]

This is great... though now I realized just how much I need a job before I move out

Seriously though I heard home depot was hiring...

It was weird to see how just buying food every now and again and figuring out how much that'd likely cost is going to kill whatever money I make. Oh well, I just hope I can get a decent ministry paying job soon...

[RAILhead]

Originally Posted by boardsurfer

Maury, thanks for the template, that must have been a lot of work to get off the ground.

by the way, you left some info in June. Dont know if you care or not.

Yeah, those are just some play numbers I left in there so you could see how the calculations are done.

Glad you liked the file!

Maury

[RAILhead]

I also have a spreadsheet for debt payoff if anyone wants me to clean it up for use, too. Just let me know. It also has some sheets for investment outcomes, figuring out how much to go into 401k and Roth, etc.

Maury

[sminch]

hi maury,

thanks for the spreadsheet, yeah? it's brilliant - my wife's looking rather surprised that i've finally got around to getting a budget sorted

one thing i added which other people might be interested in is a column on the right hand side of "for savings" and "variable expenses" +/-s - if you put in a formula to add the +/- from the previous month (eg. for cell e15 in july it'd be"=Jul.E11+B15-C15" in neooffice/j) you can keep track of your cumulative savings / overspending in each row. for example, if you don't spend your eating out allowance one month it'll add it on to the next, and you can either buy a kick arse dinner or transfer the $ out to buy some cds.

just a thought, anyway. cheers again, maury!

sminch

[RAILhead]

I'm glad I could help! After all this time, I've never setup the form to do that...I may kick that around this weekend.

Maury