How to prepare your family Budget

Discover how to prepare a family budget and win at it.

Learn:

* The fact to why we can spend, spend, spend - and never know where the money went.

* How to sit down with bank statements, checking accounts, stock portfolio’s and a list of assets to find out your true financial status.

* 7 types of assets that have real value - that you may not know to include as part of your self worth.

* Why this guide is different than other “budgeting” books. (It has to do with our “hands-on” approach.)

* 5 main categories of spending that your budget will allow (don’t worry, this should make you happy!)

* 9 defenses of budgeting to tell your partner if they need convincing.
And much more….

Budget

Budget (from French bougette, purse) generally refers to a list of all planned expenses and revenues. It is a plan for saving and spending. A budget is an important concept in microeconomics, which uses a budget line to illustrate the trade-offs between two or more goods. In other terms, a budget is an organizational plan stated in monetary terms.

In a personal or family budget all sources of income (inflows) are identified and expenses (outflows) are planned with the intent of matching outflows to inflows (making ends meet.) In consumer theory, the equation restricting an individual or household to spend no more than its total resources is often called the budget constraint.

The more complicated the budgeting process is, the less likely a person is to keep up with it. The purpose of a personal budget is to identify where income and expenditure is present in the common household; it is not to identify each individual purchase ahead of time. How simplicity is defined with regards to the use of budgeting categories varies from family to family, but many small purchases can generally be lumped into one category (Car, Household items, etc.).

Special precautions need to be taken for families operating on an irregular income. Households with an irregular income should keep two common major pitfalls in mind when planning their finances: spending more than their average income, and running out of money even when income is on average.

Clearly, a household's need to estimate their average (yearly) income is paramount; spending, which will be relatively constant, needs to be maintained below that amount. A budget being an approximate estimation, room for error should always be allowed so keeping expenses 5% or 10% below the estimated income is a prudent approach. When done correctly, households should end any given year with about 5% of their income left over. Of course, the better the estimates, the better the results will be.

To avoid running out of money because expenses occur before the money actually arrives (known as a cash flow problem in business jargon) a "safety cushion" of excess cash (to cover those months when actual income is below estimations) should be established. There is no easy way to develop a safety cushion, so families frequently have to spend less than they earn until they have accumulated a cushion. This can be a challenging task particularly when starting during a low spot in the earning cycle, although this is how most budgets begin. In general, households that start out with expenses that are 5% or 10% below their average income should slowly develop a cushion of savings that can be accessed when earnings are below average. Whether this rate of building a cushion is fast enough for a given financial situation depends on how variable income is, and whether the budgeting process starts at a high or low point during the earnings cycle.

Also see: Save on Gas