Budgeting can help strech your money further

During this economic downturn, even people who have been careful with their money, pay their bills on time and have done all that is possible to keep in the black are struggling to get ends meet. Such people shouldn’t despair, they’re doing everything they can to ‘survive’ in this uncertain economic climate, just keep up the good work.

Budgeting is a good way to control your spend and have an overall view on monthly outgoings. A good budget should show your combined income (such as salary and any benefits you receive) against regular outgoings such as bills (gas, electricity, water), entertainment (Sky/Cable, dining out) and housekeeping costs.

Once you add all your income and outgoings you’ll be left with a positive or negative figure.

A positive figure means you can decide what monthly repayments you can afford, ie - clearing credit cards or short term loans, putting some money aside for savings, etc.

With a negative balance you need to consider carefully what monthly costs you can reduce or remove altogether. The internets is plagued these days with sites that will compare your utility suppliers and show you a cheaper option, you can even switch credit cards and/or see what are the best UK pay day loans out there. As well as doing an audit on bills, there are some non-essential costs that you’ll need to cut (such as satellite TV, expensive shopping trips, etc) this will enable to settle debts and be more financially stable in the long run.

If you are budgeting to work out what you can afford to pay back to existing creditors, try to work out a timeline of which debts you might be able to settle and when, plus prioritise the most important debts and tackle them first.

Budgeting needn’t be an arduous task, many web sites will provide you with simple tools that can automate the process, such as MoneySavingExpert’s budgeting planner to uSwitch’s money saving tips

Come on, give it ago, it’s a first step to put your finance in order and figure out whether you really need to have that Starbucks breakfast every day…

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Budgeting.