It’s a brand new year and I’m sure many of you are ready to refine your focus in your life, whether it be health, relationships, finances, or spiritual growth. I’m not here to be a coach for all of that, but I do have a great resource for getting your finances in order, especially after the holidays.
So for the next month or so, I’ll be directly sharing my tips from my 20 Day Budget Challenge! I hope you join along with me, grab hold of a tip or two, and get ready to make this year the best year yet!
Welcome to my 20 Day Budget Challenge! I will only be sharing portions of it in 2023, so if you’d like the full series come to your inbox, sign up below!
20 Day Budget Challenge
Take one month to get your finances in order - learn my best money saving tips and tricks!
Yesterday I discussed how important it is to have a budget in place – and how it brings me FREEDOM! I really feel like that is a crucial mind-set to grab hold of when wanting to get your finances in order.
Now, some of you may agree that having a budget sounds like a great idea, but you aren’t exactly sure where to begin. Having a budget is key to having our money work for us, and us not being ruled by our money. If you are new to budgeting, you may want to start out just writing it out on paper. Write down what your monthly income is and all of your monthly expenses. Eventually, you will want to take that information move it to a spreadsheet where it can be easily seen and kept track of digitally.
There are some great monthly budget spreadsheet templates you can download here! You can customize these sheets to fit your exact expenses.
For our family budget, we use an excel spreadsheet and have categories for all of our expenses.
Most people will go month to month keeping track of income vs. expenses. One thing to keep in mind though is that categories like car maintenance or clothing won’t be the same month to month.
We have categories like that set up on a yearly basis.
For car maintenance, we have $1500 allocated for the entire year. Hopefully, we don’t lose an engine in January! If we did, we would have to re-evaluate and maybe tap into some of our emergency savings.
If you don’t want to separate expense categories monthly vs. yearly, then just be sure you are putting away some money each month that covers known expenses that will come up like car maintenance.
I also keep all of my receipts and stick them in my checkbook after each purchase. When my checkbook gets unruly with paper falling out of it, then I know it’s time to sit down and plug-in those numbers into the budget spreadsheet.
I spend about 45 minutes – 1 hour about once every 3-4 weeks or so doing this.
When shopping online, I use my credit card. When my credit card bill comes each month, I go line item by line item and add each expense to the budget.
It may seem like a total pain if you’ve never done this data entry before, but again, the peace you will feel knowing where your money is going is SO worth it!
My system is just one way you can keep track of your expenses – but it may not be the best for everyone! I know the cash/envelope system works well for many families!
You may want to try a smartphone version of how to set up your budget.
While I don’t use these personally, these are the two best highly rated apps to use on your smartphone to set up a budget using your smartphone.
What do you do to keep track of your purchases & bills? Come and tell us in our Budget Challenge Facebook Group!
Want all 20 days of the Budget Challenge to come straight to your inbox? If so, sign up below:
20 Day Budget Challenge
Take one month to get your finances in order - learn my best money saving tips and tricks!
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