Putting Your Budget Together

Putting a budget together can seem like an exhausting excercise at first, Where do I start?, What items will I include?

As stated already, the key to an effective budget is that you make it flexible and are realistic in terms of the financial goals that you set yourself. There is no point on setting unreasonable objectives for yourself and becoming disheartened later on when you fail to achieve those objectives.

The first objective of any budget is that we should be able to meet the basic and expected expenses that occur in our lives, i.e. food, shelter, heat, etc and also find an effective way of setting aside money to cover regular bills such as gas and electricity and less regular or annual bills such as car insurance. Too often, we are caught at the end of the month with a number of bills arriving together and no provision made. A simple and effective Budget aims to cover this expense before the pile-up begins and headaches start.

Here we provide some steps for getting that budget going.

You can also access a Budget Plan that will allow you to enter your details and will do the calculations for you. Why not try this over the the period of a month. You can use this both for estimating income and expenditure and also recording actual income and expenditure. Click to download.

  1. Pick a time frame i.e Weekly or Monthly
  2. Calculate your income the first part of our Budget Plan will help you do this.
  3. Calculate your expenses the second part of our Budget Plan will help you do this. The plan includes catagories to guide you and has “other” spaces should you wish to add more expenses.
  4. Work out the difference Our Budget Plan will automatically calculate this for you.
  5. Fine tune and plan Is this the result that you were expecting? Does your budget show that you are spending more than you earn? Now is the time to revisit your spending.
  6. Keep it up-to-date Keep track of your expenses and adjust your budget if you have to. Be flexible. You may be hit with the occasional unexpected bill or even receive a pay rise!