Organized Budget

It's Friday.  On Friday's I write my weekly menu for the following week so that Saturdays I can be in the store very early in the morning and get my shopping done.  In order to do this, I prefer to update my budget first.

Part of my weekly routine on Friday's includes a review of our family budget.
Today I am providing you a visual of what I do.  I am not presenting myself as an authority on money management in any way, I'm just sharing with you what I do as an ordinary girl.

This is a sample with fake amounts of money....I don't know anyone that raises a family on $440 per month in Canada, ha ha.

I also had this include typical budget categories while trying to make it fairly generic, and I removed others that are specific to my family.  This is just a sample to work from.  Read through the categories and scroll down below for more information.

Steps to an organized budget:

1. Create a budget. Each month, in Microsoft Excel, I create a budget.  I list what our regular income will be at the top, and include any government cheques and any additional income (i.e. we have a business we operate too)

2. Update all Expense Categories. I make sure the budget amount in each of the expense lines is correct.  If bank fees went up, or the price of gas went up, I adjust the amounts in that first column.

3. Make budget total and projected income balance. Check the total at the bottom of the first column of money.  Does it match the top where you have your projected income?  If not it's time to make some adjustments. You HAVE to make the total of your budget match the total of your projected income.

4. List in columns what you expect to spend each week. We have a weekly payroll deposit, which is quite convenient for managing a budget.  The next step is to list what funds you expect to spend each week.  You can see from this budget that groceries and gas occur each week, while most of our bills are due at the end of the month.

5. Leave unspent funds in a different colour. When I enter the funds into each week, I leave the text in orange.  

6. Update and review every week. Spent funds are black text, unspent funds are orange text.  Each Friday I go on-line and print out my bank statements for the week.  I review this against the budget.  When the assigned funds are spent, I switch the text to black.  If there was an unexpected expense, I add a new line and enter the amount in.  I usually make this text red so I can see where the hiccups in the budget were.

7. Add up unspent funds and compare against income to verify you are on track. Now once you are a week into the month's budget, add up the orange columns left and compare it against how many pay cheques you still have to come in.  You can know at ANY TIME you want to update this if you are running short or staying on track.  This system allows you to make adjustments any time of the month that you need to and any time you review your budget.  

This is just one way to organize a budget.  This does not cover yearly financial planning, that is a deeper matter.   This is just regular maintenance of a family budget.  This is how I do mine.  You could create a printable page, but I think this is best done on a computer as the updates are much easier to to.

Being organized creates order in our lives, reduces stress and frees us up to pursue the things we value the most.  I find that taking the time to update my budget each week keeps us on track and I can do my Saturday shopping with confidence, because I know what is going on with our money.

Happy planning and shopping!

Cassie