How do you manage your finances? Am doing a college course and need to ask people about organisation. I have none hence course!!!

[jellyjelly]

I have been doing a course all about money and we have to do a presentation about how people organise their money. I have a spreadsheet with how much things cost from different shops and also one with different months along the bottom with how much is outstanding.

Please share with my your words of wisdom on how you are organised.

I do know about dd and so but any tricks you care to share?

Before I got a joint account with dh, who is rubbish at organising money, I had a little book in which I wrote every withdrawal and investment, with its date. At the start of the month, just after I'd been paid, I would put in all the regular payments that I knew would go out before next payday. This way I would always know exactly how much money I had available.

I would also reconcile my little cash book with my bank statement once it arrived (used to get them fortnightly).

I never went overdrawn, despite my mortgage payments being almost 50% of my income.

Is this the sort of thing you are after?

Thanks for posting on my thread

What kind of thing are you after? How people do their budgeting, or how their personal finances are arranged?

i have a spreadsheet with all my income for various months. then from each total, i minus my regular bills, then i have another section where i take off one off payments, eg christmas, holidays, car repairs. Then i have a total of what;s left and a rolling total of savings. It's actually fairly low-tech but allows me to see at a glance what's left to come out of the bank and i don't get caught out by things like annual insurance payments.

But then I am a geek

Well its a bit lose on what i have to talk about. I have to basically give different thought on how to organise your finances.

The course is basically for people that are in debt -(which i am not) and for people not in debt to stay out of debt. Mine is organising so i have prepared a spreadsheet as none of us on the course had or used one as well as doiing a grocery spreadsheet to show the prices of things i buy often and comparing the prices and if i liked them so i can save money.

I am new to all this but this is what I am starting off.

3 accounts.

Current account, wages in, daily living expenses out.

Bill account, wages and maintenance in, all direct debits out. Excess (joke) will be filtered into savings.

Savings account, child benefit and excess in, kids clubs and activities out hope to build up excess for holidays.

I have printed off spread sheets for each week to fill in with 4 colomns for savings, bill, current and cash to record everything I pay out seperated into catagories like food shopping, kids activities, fuel, misc etc. On each page there are also 4 boxes for each money type to show starting amount, ins, outs and final balance for the week.

I hope this will help me to keep track of it all and will let me see things like how much I have spent on food shopping or fuel in a week.

Ah yes, spreadsheets are absolutely essential for budgeting! Like others, I keep running tabs on how much all my bills are each month -- electric/gas, mortgage, travel etc. (Actually I used to do this religiously every month but not so much now, because all our bills are direct debits so they don't really vary from month to month. But doing it for a year or so really helped get our finances in order.)

Other organisational things that might help include checking that you are getting the cheapest gas/electric in your area on websites like Uswitch, also comparing things like home and car insurance on websites like moneysupermarket.com. And making sure that any savings are in accounts with the highest possible interest rate, and switching debts to low-interest credit cards.

This is a really good website for money-saving tips...

HTH, good luck with your presentation

THANKS CANT SLEEP thats good. Anything else? Anyone. It will all help.

I use a great accounting package "GSP money matters". It allow me to set up multiple accounts so I can duplicate my various banks records on my own PC and track exactly what is happeneing in all of them. Every time dh or I spend anything in our bank accounts (3 - one for bills, one for cash and one for savings) oron credit cards, I put it o the software, so I can see at a glance how much money I have left and where, and forecast because all future dd's etc are on teh sytem as well.

but I'm just an anally retentive control freak