Does anyone have any helpful tips on budgets? I have no idea where all our money goes. :confused:

Have you tried foxway.com they have worksheet to give you some ideas.

Try Microsoft money (www.microsoft.com/money/), quickbooks (quickbooks.intuit.com). This applications will help you in organising your budgets

Boy, that hurts!

Microsoft Money is $49.99. Quickbooks is $99.95. Foxway is free, but you still need to be at your PC.

I am not wealthy and I don't want to turn to my PC when I want to review budget items, so I went to the corner store and picked up a monthly planner. I can clearly see the entire month and I simply write in payroll and expenses. Flip through and you can plan ahead for birthdays and holidays.

I've also learned to plan ahead for my recurring payments: say your Visa payment is due on Aug 8th (Wed), but I don't get paid till Friday the 10th. I'll budget the payment for the 3rd instead. Earlier if possible for anything that incures interest. The sooner the payment, the sooner the balance goes down, saving interest accumulation. Seems simple but nobody ever recommended this to me.

Not Quickbooks, but Quicken or Money (and you can often get either on sale). But Foxway looks interesting.

Your problem is not so much budgetting, but tracking. What you need to do is record every expenditure, even the cup of coffee each morning. You need to do this for a period of 3-6 months (preferably the 6). Once you have done that, you can then average your expenditures and create a reasonable budget.

Once that is done, you have to be fairly religious about sticking to it. What you do is create buckets of expenditures. Some of these buckets will be regular monthly bills like rent/mortgage, insurance, some utilities etc. Others will be variable or non monthly like food, clothing, entertainment. So you might budget $100/mth for food and $30/mth for clothing. In Aug if you only spend $75 on food, then you are under budget and the $25 can go into savings or be carried over. You may not spend anything on clothing in one month, so you could spend $50 in the next month because you were under budget and carried the amounts over.

Here's a tip I use to pay for get-aways: Whenever I get loose change, I stash it. At work, I put it in a tin in a drawer; on the road, I toss in a small puch in the center console; at home it goes in a large jar. Eventually they will all be completely full (for me about twice a year). Then I go to one of those money rolling machines we got in our local markets, and pour it in! Commonly end up around $500.00 each time! It's like found money because you really never miss it.

Try it!

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