Congratulations on creating your very own simple budget! Now you get to enjoy the very fun part of living with a budget. If you have a good income and all of your expenses and savings are provided for easily, that is fantastic! You may feel tempted to put the budget away and not worry about it anymore. Don't! With the dreaded possibility of identity theft and silly mess-ups at the bank, you need to keep track of your money coming in and going out. A simple budget is a great tool to help you do that. If, on the other hand, you realized after creating your simple budget, that your finances are a little tighter than you thought, then you are in the same boat as many people nowadays. It's time to buck up and use your budget.
The first step in putting your budget to use is to track what you actually spend and try to stay within your budget. If you have online access to your bank account and credit cards, this process will be pretty simple. Just look up your expenses and insert them into the appropriate category. If you don't have online access, I recommend you get it. You may be able to keep receipts, and if you're alone, you can do that. But it is very difficult to get your entire family to keep each receipt. Just don't wait until you get your bank and credit card statements in the mail before inserting your expenses. It is much easier to stay within your budget if you can watch your spending as the month is progressing. Maintaining a budget is very forward-thinking. Wouldn't you rather say, "we don't have the money to buy that at this time" than "why did we spend so much for that?" Well, maybe not. But the whole reason you created a budget is to be more responsible with your money.
I recommend setting aside a time once a week to insert your expenses into your spreadsheet budget. The way I do this is in Column C, I will insert each paycheck into the cell corresponding to the income category and each expense into the cell corresponding to the expense category. I just add them together as I go. For example, say I went to the grocery store twice last week spending $65.14 and $72.78. In column C next to Groceries I will type =65.14+72.78 and press enter. Voila! This gives you the total amount you have spent in this category so far. This gets a little trickier and harder to keep track of if you have a lot of expenses in a certain category. This alone is plenty of motivation to only go to the grocery store once a week. lol. But if it's a problem for you, consider subdividing your categories (ex. make separate rows for Wal-mart and Randall's) Once you have entered your expenses for each category, then put the total at the bottom and you can calculate how much you have remaining from your total income the way you did your planned expenses.
There are many ways you can organize your budget. Rather than adding up your expenses, you can subtract them from your budgeted amount so you can easily see how much you have remaining. You can color-code your categories. If you notice you really have trouble at the end of the month, you can split your budget month in two and have a separate budget for each paycheck if you get paid twice monthly. It doesn't really matter how your budget is organized as long as the math is correct and honest
One thing to keep in mind when working with your budget is that you have made this tool to help improve your life. Do whatever you can to make the process more enjoyable so you will actually want to use it. Use pictures, color, favorite inspirational quotations, etc. Now go have some fun with your simple budget.
