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Knowing how to manage money can help you make smart choices. Your money will work harder for you. You’ll be more likely to avoid traps that can undermine your ability to attain your financial goals. You’ll be in a better position to pay off debt and build savings.

Calculate how much money you earn in a month after taxes. For this budget plan, use your net pay or take home pay. Include tips, supplementary income, side-jobs, investments etc. This is your income.

Figure out your expenses. The best way to do this is to save receipts for a month or even a couple weeks. Knowing how much per month you spend on groceries or gas makes the next part much easier. If you want to start writing your budget today, and don’t have receipts, that’s OK, it’s just a bit more difficult.

Read and post messages on personal finance and budgeting topics with other people from around the world. Everything from saving money on groceries, to understanding your credit rating. This will get you some good tips on where you might be able to trim.

Break your budget up into some basic categories. You might want to organize your expenses into needs – such as your loan and electricity – and wants – such as clothing and entertainment.

List all your spending under each of these categories. Let’s take Auto as an example: $300/month car payment, $100/month insurance, $250/month on gas, $50/month on maintenance, 10$/month on fees such as registration. So, your total Auto budget for the month would be $710/month. If you don’t know the exact amounts you spend, try to make good estimates. The more accurate you are, the better chance your budget has of working.

After getting an overview of your monthly expenses, look for anything that you can cut down to help you save money. For example, if you always eat out at work, try bringing left over or home cooked meal. You can also bring sandwiches and drinks. This can save you an average of $200 per month if you estimate $10 of lunch per day.

Limit your movie watching to once or twice a month instead of four times a month. For a huge family this can be a lot of savings. Before going to the movies, eat first to cut down on food and drink expenses. Just buy drinks or bring your own if you can. You can cut down transportation fees such as fare, gasoline and toll fees if you participate in a carpool or ride sharing.

A simple budget can be written on a piece of a paper with a pencil, and optionally, a calculator. Such budgets can be organized in three-ring binders or a file cabinet. Simpler still thre are the pre-formatted household budgeting or bookkeeping forms that creates a budget by filling in the blanks. It is really easy to budget if you want to, but as most people don’t follow thier own plan most are doomed to fail.

Gav Shannon is a Network Marketing Professional who writes about different topics that he feels may be of an interest.If You want to know more about him go to http://www.gavshannon.com

Firstly, what do I mean by a financial goal? For most of us, that would generally be a goal to either increase income or reduce consumer debt. Of course there may be times in our lives where we want to increase consumer debt to acquire goods and services sooner or to reduce our income as a trade off to have more time but in this article, let’s set those situations aside. In particular, let’s look at the scenario of reducing consumer debt by 50% in six months.

My standard formula for goal setting is to select a coach, have the required resources in place and to have a plan-A and a plan-B in place so let’s see how a financial goal fits in with this.

Selecting a financial coach these days is difficult indeed. Most financial advisors will only try to sell you products, thereby limiting their own risk in a highly litigious environment. If your goal is to reduce your personal debt by 50% in 6 months the financial advisor might be dismissive if there is no chance of selling a product into your situation.

Similarly, a debt financer will try and sell you a product that appears to reduce your debt but in fact does very little. Finally there are educators, who provide information but are prohibited by law to give financial advice. While they can give illustrations or tell you what they did, they cannot specifically advise you what to do and therefore cannot really be your coach.

I am aware, however, of some wealth creation companies that provide ‘integrated’ solutions providing all of the required professionals in a single meeting. By nature, however, the cost of this service is out of reach of many. One solution might be to use self-help websites and software to help resolve this situation, in conjunction with education and perhaps a visit to a financial advisor if necessary.

What resources do you need to reduce personal debt? Well first of all, you must be able to measure and control what you are spending. Yes, I am talking about the dreaded budget. With internet banking and plastic cards, it is relatively easy to download transactions from all of your banks and put them into a spreadsheet. I believe that the most important tool, however, is the banking system itself. With high interest-earning no-fee accounts available it is possible to use the banking system and the utilities to do a lot of the budget accounting for you.

The Plan-A is what you will do if you are on track to achieve your goal. Is there some kind of reward for achieving your goal? Clearly to reduce personal debt, you must have a system to control what you spend, so at a minimum a separate card account and bills account but more likely around 9 high interest no fee accounts and one card account per partner, preferably a debit card (or secured credit card).

The Plan-B is to identify the biggest risk and what to do if it happens. If, for example, you think that your car might need $1,000 of repairs but you can’t set aside that much money over the next 6 months, what will you do? Will you change the deadline, or cut costs in other areas? Can you do without a car?

Finally, tracking a financial goal and measuring the level of success is straight-forward when you have the right tools in place, such as internet banking.

Glen Smith aka Glen The Goals Guy has been running both goal-setting and budgeting workshops.
Visit http://QuickStartGoals.com or http://BillBanisher.com

Creating a business budget is very similar to creating a personal budget. However there are some differences. When you own a business, taxes are not directly taken out of your income, which makes your income and any quarterly tax payments extra important to track. Having an accurate and realistic budget will help you make accurate spending decisions and make it easier to predict profits. Which means the more frequently you track you costs, the better.

Here are the recommended steps for creating your business budget:

Step 1: Determine how frequently you want to track your costs and income. Generally, it is advisable to choose every week or every month. At first it may seem like a time-consuming task to track and enter your spending every week, but it will pay off in the long run and as you become accustomed to it, you’ll find that it really only takes you a few minutes every week.

Step 2: Determine your expenses. This means your operating costs like your phone and web hosting fees, the costs of your taxes, the costs of outsourcing and the costs for marketing, publicity and so on. Make a list of all categories you anticipate having costs and all areas where you already know your expenses.

Step 3: Now the fun stuff! You get to predict your income. The best bet is to predict on the conservative side. That way if you have a bad month, your budget isn’t blown; however, when you have a good month, and you will have many good months, you’ll have extra money to work with.

Step 4: Track your expenses and income and review your budget often. Your budget isn’t set in stone. It is a living breathing thing that will change as your business changes. If you find you’re spending more in one category, make the adjustments in your budget. A business budget isn’t a diet or a strict regimen, it is a spending plan.

Step 5: Realize that in the beginning, it is likely that you’ll have more expenses than income. This is normal for most start up businesses. Track the difference between what you do spend in each category and what you planned on spending. This will help you predict the future and keep your budget realistic and accurate.

Budgeting your small business is good business. Without a budget you’re unable to make accurate predictions and keep your business profitable and going strong. If you’re serious about being a successful business owner, you can’t do without a business budget. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be difficult. A simple spreadsheet and a little time can make all the difference.

Eddie Lamb owns LiveMortgageFree.com a website devoted to helping homeowners, first time buyers or tenants. You’ll get your own exclusive access to the program and bonuses that will get you on the road to living Mortgage Free. For more information visit: http://LiveMortgageFree.com/

Small business owners generally fall into two categories. There are the business owners that let their accounting tasks, invoicing, and payables pile up on their desk – or even in a shoe box, until they’re forced to face the music. Usually this happens around tax time.

The other sides of the coin are the business owner that are amazingly organized and know where every penny of their money is going. What do these business owners have that the rest of us don’t? More time? A PhD in accounting? Nope, chances are they have a system. To put it more simply, they’re organized. If you’re in the crowd of business owners that let it all pile up, there are a few things we can learn from the more organized folks. If we take just a few of the steps organized business owners take, not only will we save several days of excruciating paperwork, we will have a firmer grasp on our money.
Here are some recommendations for good bookkeeping practices:

#1: Record income and expenses on a regular basis. If you have a budget, recording this information is as easy as taking a few minutes each week or about an hour a month and recording your income and expenses on your budget. Your budget will have expense categories that reflect your business and which are broken into subcategories that make it easy for you to record. For the less organized, a simple system is to keep a file for your week’s receipts and payments. Using this method all you have to do is pull out your paperwork at the end of the week, add it up, record it, and you’re good to go. Literally 10-15 minutes of your time.

#2: Create expense categories that make sense for your business. Trying to fit your business budget and bookkeeping categories into a standard form may not work for you. Not all categories will apply to your business and it can end up feeling like an incomplete and inaccurate project. For example, a direct sales company will have an expense category that includes shipping and receiving as well as an inventory category. However, a service business won’t have those categories and will end up with blanks in their spreadsheet. Spend some time going over your accounts and create a list of expense categories that work for your business.

#3: Have a method. When you have a bookkeeping method, a software program or a spreadsheet, and you use it, transferring the information to your budget or vice versa is just like cutting and pasting the information from one document to another. It’s easy.

Having control over your money is a necessity as a business owner and if you’re not keeping a budget or tracking your accounts, you’re less in control of your money. It’s worth taking a few minutes and organizing your accounts. You won’t regret it!

Eddie Lamb owns LiveMortgageFree.com a website devoted to helping homeowners, first time buyers or tenants. You’ll get your own exclusive access to the program and bonuses that will get you on the road to living Mortgage Free.For more information visit: http://LiveMortgageFree.com/

Do you have a burning desire to achieve in a sport, hobby, talent or business venture but you never seem to have the time or money to achieve it?

Today I am going to talk about the importance of budgeting in relation to goal setting. For years and years I have set goals but I never used to fully fund the goals.

Before I had a home loan it was pretty easy actually, I would make a list with my family of all the things we wanted the following month. The purchases were prioritized and purchased as funds became available each week. Once I had a home loan, which obviously was one of the goals on our list, I found that our finances were a lot tighter than what they were before and it became a lot harder to set aside funds for the other things our family wanted to have and do.

So what tended to happen was the money was consumed immediately and for longer term goals there was no funding whatsoever. One of my goals was to go motor-racing, and there always seemed to be something more important to do than to put aside money for a go-kart, for example.

It took me years and years to get around to actually buy a go-kart; we would buy this or that or there was something else which needed doing. To actually have a lump sum available, $4000 or $5000 to buy a go-kart never seemed to happen. I think I ended up getting it from a tax refund.

However, what we do now is set aside some money on a regular basis for our longer term goals. Even if this does not fully fund your goal, let’s say you wanted to buy a go-kart for $5,000, maybe you put aside $100 a week and in a year, you’ve got your $5,000; maybe you can’t afford $100 a week, maybe you can only afford $50 a week, then at the end of the year you’ve got $2,500, and then you go and finance the balance of $2,500 some other way.

Without putting aside funds, things go from bad to worse and your goal will never happen. Let’s say your objective is to get to the national championship of your sport and that every week without balancing your budget you find that you run out of money. Most people will start doing overtime for example, to make more money. If you start doing more overtime, then you might have less time to put towards your sport or your hobby. So instead of training five nights a week on your sport or talent, all of a sudden or it could be practicing a musical instrument or that, you find that you start cutting your time down and spending less and less time on your goals and more and more time on trying to make ends meet.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a balanced budget in the first place, to make sure that you have got enough money coming in to cover your expenses, and sure you might have a national trip coming up and say I need $6,000 to go on an overseas trip to go to the international championships and maybe you debt finance a part of it. Still, we are talking about planning and spending as opposed to spending and planning.

Since we’ve started having a balanced budget, I have found is that it is a lot easier to hit those goals that we’ve been aiming for, and still have enough for all those things like Christmas and holidays and replacing cars and all that sort of thing.
In fact, my wife told me the other day that she’s made $500 of interest on the money she’s spent this year. It goes to show that once you get your budget balanced, that money can start working in your favor instead of against you. Now that’s not an overnight thing and I don’t promote the idea of just going to try and pay off your credit card all in one hit, or pay off all of your debts in one go.

It is more important to get the habit right than to get the actual debt paid off because it really takes some discipline and practice to establish the habit and you really need to set aside the funds that you need so that when your bills come in, you can afford to pay for them.

Once I set up my automatic payments for my big goal, I also set up high yield interest earning accounts and set aside funds for other known events such as holidays and gifts, car registration and repairs and I set up automatic payments for those things that my family uses weekly such as utilities. My wife and I have separate card accounts for day to day things and I know that I can spend all of the money in the card account without blowing the budget and my big goal.

Disclaimer: This document is educational and should not be considered advice. If you are in financial difficulty please get professional advice.

Glen Smith aka Glen The Goals Guy has been running goal setting courses for 13 years. Visit
http://GlenTheGoalsGuy.com or http://BillBanisher.com