One reason many people hate budgeting is because it is time consuming. It can take an hour to balance your checkbook each month, especially if you can’t find the one mistake that you made. It is more difficult than just balancing your checkbook, since you need a constant running total of what you have spent where. It usually falls on the shoulders of one spouse, who then becomes resentful about having to deal with it all the time. While the initial planning and setting up of your budget may take awhile (sorry there is no way around it), here are five tips to help you once you’ve started.
1) You can keep a running budget ledger in your checkbook, and feel out the individual categories as you spend the money. This works really well if you already keep a running balance of your checking account. It literally takes two or three seconds to flip and to the category and subtract the amount. You can learn more about a great system to do this in “Rich on Any Income.”
2) You could switch to a cash only system. You create envelopes for different categories and put the amount of money you can spend in each category in the corresponding envelope. If you need to know how much you have left, just open the envelope and you can count it. Once the money is gone, it’s gone.
3) If you don’t keep a running ledger you can quickly record transactions on your PDA. There are programs that allow you to sync these transactions with your budgeting software, which only takes a minute each evening. You will always know where you stand.
4) Instead of letting the receipts pile up, take a few minutes every night to enter in any spending that you did, pay any bills that you received. If you do not have a huge stack waiting for you, you are less likely to put it off.
5) Make sure that you know how much you have left to spend before you spend out of a category. A budget is a lot easier to manage if you do not constantly have to changes the numbers around.
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Budget Strategies: 5 Tips to Help You Stick to Your Budget