Why budget is important

Are you feeling that your economy is controlling you rather than the way around? It doesn’t have to be like that. With proper planning and analysis, you can create a sustainable budget for yourself and even your family.

Budgeting is widely accepted to be a good idea for sustainable financial health, but it sounds boring and complicated. Ever since I got my first job I have created my own budget, in this article, I’m going to show you how easy it is and what you can gain from it. I have never been worried about my economy, not even when I was laid off back in the day.

How to create a budget

As soon as I get my salary I head on to https://sheets.google.com and go on my budget sheet. In this spreadsheet, I enter all of my costs for insurances, rent, subscriptions, food, car gas, and savings. Everything that goes out of my account the following month goes into this spreadsheet, if there’s extra spending such as Christmas and birthdays then I add those too.

For my coming month, I got the following budget.

This will give a clear view of what you want to spend your money on, and the cost of it. Another form of budget I use is breaking down each purchase I have to make. For example:

You can create this based on your previous month’s purchases, then you can adjust it to how you want to spend your money. I’ve saved thousands by doing this. Each month I go through every item and think if this is a needed monthly occurring purchase. For example, I recently removed Spotify because even though it’s just $10/month, in the long run, that’s $600 in 5 years if you calculate (10 * 12) * 5. Why spend $600 when you can use free services such as Youtube?

How to stick to your budget

Sticking to a budget is hard, but if you think about it. People tend to adapt to their current economic situation. Why not automate it? Contact the company of all of your reoccurring payments and ask them to draw them from your account automatically. You can also contact your bank and make them move a portion of your money to a savings account each month automatically.

This means that at the start of the month what’s left in your account is the money that you can do what you want with. What I normally do is also moving aside the money for food to another account as well. Then moving back some when I shop for groceries. Alternatively, you can get another bank card for just food, but normally there are pretty high charges for that. ($30/year with my bank).

What do you do if there are unexpected charges?

This tends to happen, your car breaks down, something needs fixing, the list goes on. This is solved by an emergency fund, in your budget you can set aside a bit of money each month and add it to your emergency fund. I have one month of saving in my emergency fund and looking back it has saved me from so much trouble, and not just me. When my partner and family members were struggling I could easily borrow my money to them and help them out.