What have you found to be the best way to make a personal budget and make it work?

Question

I'm using MSMoney. It's a great tool but time consuming. What has worked for you? How did you make it easy enough that the whole family was able to participate?
I make a very good salary and have a fantastic career, but still find that we are living paycheck to paycheck.
Any advice would be great.

Answer 1

In my opinion, a budget is worthless unless you have a practical way to actually implement it in real life. Here's a good way to do it - after you do your budget and figure out how much you can spend each month after bills are paid, control your variable out-on-town spending (lunches, dinners, entertainment, coffees, groceries, gas, etc...) by getting a debit card account separate from your checking account. Load your budgeted amount for these categories at the beginning of the month, and then use the card. If you want/need to get more granular on your spending, you could get more than one card (neccessities vs. entertainment vs. blow (in Dave Ramsey-speak)). Don't touch the money in your checking account that is not assigned to these expenses. At the end of the month, do you have money left? If not, why not? Keep this up for a few months and you'll really start to see a difference in how you manage your spending - you'll know where your money is going. The advantage of this to the cash method is that you have electronic records of your spending that you can access online. I heard about this system from a neighbor of mine and have been doing it myself. I got a prepaid card from Readydebit and it works for me. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I could track what I spend, but I could never stick to a formal budget.

What did I do? I paid myself first. Have money deducted from your paycheck automatically to savings or investment account. Then live on the rest. The ideal time to do this is at pay raise time. If you get a 5% raise, have your company start deducting 5% from your check to go into savings.

Once you get used to that, you never miss the money.

A great book to read on the subject, and get really motivated with, is Automatic Millionaire by David Bach. I'm sure you can find it used or at a library.

Secondly, come to terms that stuff does not equal happiness. Stop buying stuff that you use once or twice and then just sits around. Stop buying new cars so often, when the one you have works fine. A great book on this subject is The Millionaire Next Door which describes how ordinary people became wealthy.

Answer 3

The answers in front of mine are good. We are a Dave Ramsey family, and are completely under control. I would do the 13 week Financial Peace University (it costs 100 bucks, and you need to take your spouse).

What we did after the course was to go back through a years' worth of spending, and outline what we actually spent on different items each month. This led to our making a realistic monthly budget, which we plan out each month (just got our September one done last night), and we stick to it. Oh yeah, use cash, no CC's. Makes it much easier.

The first 3 months, the budget took 2 hours, now it takes 20 minutes.

You will change your life.

Answer 4

CASH.

Rather than usinga check book or on line banking to pay bills, buy gas for the car, buy groceries etc,

Get either a several pocket accordian folder or several envelopes and have one for each category in the budget.
1. Car expenses
2. Household expenses (utilities, groceries)
3. Bills (credit cards and otehr things not household related)
4. entertainment
5. clothes (yes make a budget part for this even if you don't buy them often)

then as you get paid, cash a check for the amount needed for the budget and put the budgeted ammount in eachfolder or envelope.

Once the funds are gone from the envelope, you wait until next pay day to do that thing again (entertainment is the main one this will happen to) If it's the grocery budget that rund out, don't let the kids starve but make sure to adjust your shopping the next pay period so you can make it the next week.

If you have kids you give an allowance to, do the same thing with their allowance and NO ADVANCES ON ALLOWANCE it starts them on a debt idea early.

Answer 5

I use a free online tool expenseRegister.com. I can set up a budget, record and track my spending, setup reminders, etc. I totally agree with you about MS Money, also quicken... way too time consuming and very complicated for my needs.

Answer 6

Add me to the list of Dave Ramsey fans. I use MS Money to track spending, but I use a sheet of paper to make my budget. Actually I 'cheat' by using MS Excel to do the math, but the process is identical to using a sheet of paper.

Answer 7

daveramsey.com

You're right, everyone in the family should be involved. Dave agrees, too. Budgeting is time consuming at first but you're right, it shouldn't always be. Dave agrees, too. And you're right, you shouldn't be living from paycheck to paycheck. Dave agrees, too.

Answer 8

only one way i was on a job paying £125,000 a year british pounds, after just a month in this new business i had to hand my notice in. take a look at these, you can do it part time but after your first couple of sales you will want to be full time.

www.imabreezer.com
www.make-you-money.biz

its worth just a look if nothing more.

Answer 9

keep it simple. use paper.

http://www.gazelleintense.com/pdfs/monthly_cash_flow.pdf

cut out stuff you can live without... cable, renting movies... eating out.... cell phones... etc...