No doubt you can anticipate big expenses for your family of four: college tuition, weddings, retirement. Creating a budget is one of the wisest things you can do to secure your family's financial future. By planning a budget and sticking to it, you instill financial awareness in your children and set habits for your family that will stay with them for a lifetime.
Instructions
1. Make a list of all of your monthly expenses. Consider your rent or mortgage, including any monthly dues or homeowner fees. Include car payments and gasoline costs, or bus and subway expenses. List utilities, such as gas, electric, cable, phone, trash and water; groceries, home and car insurance, property taxes and educational costs.
2. Make columns on a piece of notebook paper or create a document in a spreadsheet program. Label columns for each monthly expense. You can group some of them together, such as Home, Transportation, Insurance, Education and Utilities.
3. Using your monthly bills, calculate how much money you spend on each item. Fill out the columns to get an accurate snapshot of your expenses.
4. Add up the columns to determine how much money you spend each month. In an adjacent column, input your monthly income and subtract the difference to see how much money you have left over each month.
5. Create another list of things you want to save for in the future, such as weddings, college and retirement. Allot an amount of money that you will need to save for each child, and how much money you'd like to have saved when you retire. Use a retirement calculator to determine this amount.
6. Subtract the amount of your savings goal from the amount of money you have left each month. This number is how much money you have left for personal expenses, such as new clothing, entertainment and travel. If the amount is too small, analyze your monthly expenses to see what extras you can cut out; perhaps a premium movie channel from your cable bill, or extra minutes on your cell phone.
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