How to Budget Your Money

One of the important aspects of saving money is budgeting it. If you’re spending more than your saving, well, you aren’t doing yourself any favors in your quest to save money! You really need to calculate everything you’re spending, down to the last cent, because as I’ve said before, it all adds up.

But how can you actually budget your money, what are the steps for it? It’s easy to say ‘count your spending’, but not so easy to implement, unless you know what you’re doing.

• Calculate what income you’re getting – not only from your regular earnings, but any other income, such as coming from savings interest, child support (if any), tips, overtime money, anything that is considered ‘extra’.
• Make sure you can identify all your expenses – this includes housing, utilities, taxes, house repairs, extra purchases (cars, computers, etc). Keep every single receipt. Now it is a good time to learn an efficient filing system (buy a cheap binder where you can save all these papers in).
• Now you need to compare your income with your expenses – What is more, income or expenses? If income is more, you’re on the right track. But if expenses are more, this is where the red flag should come up, as this is where you need to start saving big time, by cutting back on extra spending.

Unfortunately there are so few people who ever think of budgeting, which is pretty much why there are so many people in debt. Very few of them realize that they spend too much on worthless expenses, because they are not budgeting and don’t see the forest from the trees, as they say.

Money saving with coupons

Saving money doesn’t need to always be on a grand scale. Believe me, every tiny bit helps. I’ve been there, done that, and finally got out of it alive and well. So you can do it too.

One of the things I learned early enough to do is to hunt for coupons online and offline.

For offline coupon, check out your newspapers. If you’re not sure where the coupons are, definitely buy the Sunday newspaper, in most countries all over the world, coupons are included there. Take your scissors and cut out your coupons. Even those that you think you’ll never use. The main idea here is to have as many coupons in one place, so when there is a big sale somewhere, you have all your coupons ready to go and use!

You could do this with your whole family. Everybody has different hobbies, interests, tastes, etc. Some family members might want to use coupons that you’d gladly overlook.

For online coupons, there are several websites that offer just that: coupons for saving at most of the online stores.

For example, this is how many people get discounts at Godaddy, Namecheap, etc, where they can buy a domain for a year with at least $1 or 2 discount of the regular price.

My personal favorite, this is how I got some really great 20% coupons for Amazon purchases when I went to college and I had to pay for my tuition books. And trust me, tuition books ARE expensive! You can save a lot when using online coupons. One of the main sites I regularly use for coupons is Retail Me Not. Make sure you keep checking it at least on a weekly basis,  you will save lots!

Why do you need to save money?

Besides the obvious reason, the ability to save money is crucial in building up your wealth. The most important aspect of saving money is to spend less than you usually earn. Yes, it is very easy to say but not so easy to do, so this site will offer you several ways to do just that: save money to survive on the tightest of budgets – having the ultimate goal in mind: to increase your wealth!

Here are just a couple of things to get you started and make you think.

1. Build up your emergency fund! – did you know that 80% of the regular folks just like us, don’t actually have an emergency fund set aside? We all work for a living, and live from our earnings, and sometimes we are shortsighted enough (or naive enough) to think that this situation will last until our old age. Wrong! We can never be sure what life has in store for us, and being prepared for the worst, or at least the unexpected, will save us from lots of headaches (to say the least) later on then the tough is going rough.
2. Cut your extra spending – but you might say that you already do that! Well, sometimes the small things do add up, things which we take so much for granted that we don’t realised that we could save even more! Try to see your daily activities with fresh eyes, and see where your next dollar is going. Do you really need to spend it, or you could live without that extra something that you were just about to buy?
3. Create an automatic saving plan – there are just too many expenses in our daily lives that we can’t always oversee, so creating an automatic saving plan is just the ticket to catch any ’spending leaks’. For example you can use direct deposit to leave a small part of your paycheck in there. Set up an automatic transfer of an x amount of your paycheck to be sent to this direct deposit account the very same day your salary comes in. This way you won’t even notice the difference, but you will notice later on when these funds are there when you will need them in a serious emergency!

These are just a couple of basic ways of saving money to get your mind working. There are plenty of money saving posibilities out there, and next articles will focus just on showing you how!