Budgeting For Your Family
Budgeting for your family can be a huge challenge, especially when you start thinking about the cost of food for the family, school, clothes and everything else involved in raising little ones. However, there are ways you can look after your family and still effectively budget your money…
Paper or Electronic
The first step to creating a budget for your family life is to decide whether you want to use paper or electronics. By using electronic software to he,o you budget you can of course be accurate and it will allow you to track several things at once, however paper is a simple method which many people find effective. It is important that you decide which method is the best one for you and then work with that.
Sometimes you may have loans or debts such as working capital paypal, and depending on how large the debt is, you may need to make a separate budget for the repayment of these loans. For this type of budget you will be better using software which you can use to track the spending.
Bring Everything you have
For your family budget to work effectively, you are going to need to include every incoming and outgoing money you have within the family. This will be from you and your partner, and once you put it together you will get an idea of how financially stable you are.
Take all of the information you have and put it into three sections: incoming cash, essential outgoings i.e bills and contracts, and then expendable income which will be used for food, savings and your lifestyle.
Know Where You Spend
Once you have taken a look at the incomings and outgoings, you will want to start shifting through your bank statements to see where you could be saving money by not buying things. For this you will need to take your bank statement from the last month and have a look at how to cut your costs. For example if you notice that you spend a couple of dollars each day on your lunch, try to work out ways to cut the costs by making your own lunch at home.
Control Random Spending
Once you have set up your budget spreadsheet, you will be able to see where your money is going and how to cut down your spending. First you can take a look at your bills and see if you can find out a way of cutting the price down. For example you can have a look at your energy bills and compare the price with other companies to see if there is any way of reducing the cost.
Once you have tackled the bills, you can find ways to budget everything else. One of the biggest expenditure for families is the food shop. If you start to look for big batch meals and ones which can be frozen, you will be able to save a lot of money for you and the family.
