A personal financial budget is a money allocation plan which is part of your financial plan enabling you to outline your financial goals. Establishing a personal financial budget is not difficult and has tremendous payoffs. You can better establish and regulate your financial resources, set and achieve your financial objectives, and make advance decisions as to how you want your finances best to function for you.
The main idea in creating a personal financial budget is to put aside a certain amount of money for expected as well as unexpected costs, based on previous expenses and bills, as well as define savings amounts in its optimal state. It therefore enables you to position yourself to build wealth in the long-term. In order to create a useful personal financial budget as part personal financial planning you must do the following:
Step 1. Determine how to allocate your compensation by first identifying your spending habits. Define fixed expenses (e.g., home, auto, utilities, insurances, etc.) thoroughly for a month and write everything down and add it all up. Even if your utilities fluctuate a little you can estimate the cost after an average month. Through proper determination of your “spending patterns”, you can immediately identify solutions for creating an effective personal financial budget for your needs.
For instance, when you have a steady monthly net income (after tax take home pay) of $5,000, you should subtract all of your identified monthly expenses from that income – making a list of the regular monthly amounts. Spreadsheets are often useful for keeping track of this information. Many people often create an excel spreadsheet budget to track expenses. There can be benefits to creating multiple year personal financial budget plans.
Step 2. Next, assess other bills, like those that may occur periodically during the year. These can be estimated and then subtracted from the amount of your income. You have one of two ways of doing this. The first way is to compute the total for a year, divide the total by 12, and subtract that monthly amount by putting the money into savings to build until you need it. The second way is if you have enough surplus you can just budget the full annual, semiannual, or other bill in full or in some other payment arrangement.
Step 3. The balance that remained after fixed costs can now be budgeted across miscellaneous household expenses and savings. Budgeting for savings is often overlooked and therefore often will not get done. A short-term 2-5 year savings goal needs a minimum 2-year personal financial budget plan so you can see where you are going. A short-term impulse buying view is often what prevents people from accumulating savings and building wealth.
Step 4. To best determine how to ensure you contribute to savings, you can do this one of two ways. You could use dollar amounts for a group call miscellaneous like gas, clothing, entertainment and groceries. Some people promote using proportions or percentages. But think about it, if your income increases, does that mean your miscellaneous expenses should or should your savings increase instead? So, using dollar amounts instead of percentages could be advantageous to your savings goal.
Step 5. Ideally you have a minimum of 3 cash or banking accounts. These expenses should be allocated across 2 checking accounts – the first for paying bills and for transferring money to at least a second checking account and one savings account ( if you do not have direct deposit across all of these accounts). The second checking account would be for your household, miscellaneous, spending money and not the recurring bills. Then a third short-term savings/emergency account (later adding longer-term savings accounts of course) but these are beginning steps that many people never put into practice.
These are ways to establish a basic financial plan and to prevent usage of non-allocated money for miscellaneous or impulse expenses. These are beginning steps that many people never put into practice that are beneficial and can be built upon, for long-term financial planning.
Most people want nothing more than to be able to effectively manage their finances. After all, Joe Public works hard for the money and hates to see his money going towards things that don’t further his financial objectives or build his future. This is the reason Joe needs to budget but he also needs to teach his family about the necessity of budgeting as well.
If the Publics execute budgeting strategies effectively, this should help them to see where their money is going. They will begin to get more bang out of each buck that comes into their home and their savings and future family goals and dreams will start to take form.
5 Essential Steps to budgeting secrests for newbies:
1. The first smart thing to do in budgeting is to set a goal. You have to determine what you want to achieve? Is your desire to be able to pay your monthly bills on time? Do you want to buy that hot new plasma or do you need a new car? Goals help to shape your budget and budgets help to best serve your interests.
2. Jot down daily spending in a pocket notebook. Write down what you spend your money on. This will help you know without a shadow of a doubt where your money is going. This notebook should include every little expenditure that we likely never track like, snack purchases, trips to the local ice cream shop, the Friday night video rental and so forth. Don’t forget to track these forgotten miscellaneous purchases religiously. This is the only way you will be able to stop, cut and drop little purchases that add up to big money drains at the end of each month.
3. Identify your regular expenditures. Take into consideration what you need to do in order to cut waste out of your budget all together. Your daily caffeine fix and your daily paper may be costing you an estimated $3500 per year. Over a ten year period that is $35,000. Now you may love coffee but if you are going to invest in it that much, it should be paying you some sort of interest shouldn’t it?
4. Jot down the amount you earn and compare it what you are spending. Create a system that works for you and will help you keep track of your monthly budgeting progress. You can make use of computer cash management programs, or download a basic money management spreadsheet online.
5. Forget about the Jones’. The Jones have it all because they can really afford to by it. As their neighbor we sometimes find ourselves trying to do what they do because of image of success and happiness they seem to project. This behavior causes us to reach or qualify for monthly payments that help us to feel good about our new plasma tv or car but when the payments start to weigh in on our budget, we find it hard to cope sometimes.
In order to be effective in budgeting secrets for newbies, we have to remember the long term objectives and forget about the short term payoff. Spending a chunk of our money on things that depreciate in value and don’t progress our current financial standing is just financially immature.
You can use the Money program to create a budget. By using Money for budgeting purposes, you can compare your actual spending to your budgeted spending. You use Money’s Budget Planner tool to set up a budget.
1. Display the Budget Planner window.
Click the Planner link, and choose Budget Planner. Money then displays the Budget Planner window.
2. Use the Budget Planner Wizard.
The Budget Planner Wizard steps you through a very thorough process for creating a budget based on your exact income, your long-term savings plans and goals, the possibility of occasional extraordinary expenses, your contractual debt payments for car loans and mortgages, and your anticipated expenses. To step through this planning process, click hyperlinks in the Budget Planner window. Read the instructions inside the windows and, when prompted, provide data by filling in fields. After you finish with the Budget Planner Wizard, you have a complete and very detailed budget.
How do I create a personal financial plan?
Money supplies a Lifetime Planner tool that in effect creates a personal financial plan for you. The Lifetime Planner is a wizard that collects and then analyzes a large volume of personal financial data concerning you and your family, your current financial situation, and your future financial aspirations. The Lifetime Planner starts with a video. Just as with the Budget Planner, read the instructions inside the windows and, when prompted, provide data by filling in fields.
Personal financial planning sounds complex, but it consists of three basic tasks: First, you need to make sure that you manage your day-to-day finances in a way that keeps your financial affairs simple and hassle free. (If you use the Money program to keep your checkbook and other financial records, you are already doing this.)
Second, personal financial planning means identifying and then prudently preparing for long-term financial objectives, such as a comfortable retirement, sending a child to college, or making a major purchase, such as a house. You can spend an enormous amount of time planning for these sorts of major events, but you don’t have to because the planning process isn’t all that difficult. In most cases, you can figure out what you need to do to retire quite easily. Numerous books have been written on the subject.
The same is true of other financial objectives-if you take advantage of well known and popularly discussed tools, it is typically not that difficult to prepare.
The third element of personal financial planning is the mitigation of financial risks where possible. This is perhaps the least understood and most overlooked task of personal financial planning. In a nutshell, you need to make sure that a personal tragedy, such as loss of life of a breadwinner or a serious illness, doesn’t become a financial tragedy.
Obviously, you can’t prevent personal tragedies. Parents die, children get terrible illnesses, and catastrophic events, sometimes forces of nature, destroy property and wreak havoc on people’s lives. However, in all of these cases, you can usually buy insurance that lets you share the cost of these financial disasters with large groups of other people. Then if you happen to become the next unfortunate victim, you will at least receive a claim payment that minimizes or eliminates the financial costs.
How do I plan for a child’s college expenses?
The goal is to save enough money in the years before a child goes off to college to pay for four or five years of tuition.
The first step is to make an estimate about what the child’s college expenses will total. Every year, major U.S. news magazines, such as US News and World Report, provide comprehensive lists of college cost information. Obtain one of these magazines and estimate what college will cost when your son or daughter attends.
After you determine the cost, you then calculate the amount you need to save. The tricky part of saving for college is that you often can’t use investment choices that deliver high real rates of return. In fact, it’s common that you will be saving for college using investment choices that don’t deliver a positive after-tax real rate of return. What this means, unfortunately, is that in many cases you can produce a fairly accurate estimate of how much you need to save for college simply by looking at the total cost of college and dividing this amount by the number of months between now and the time your child attends.
NOTE If you are beginning to save money while your child is still an infant, you may feel comfortable investing in the stock market, which will return a positive after- tax real rate of return.