Give me all your tips for starting monthly budgeting please. I need to get organised.

[WriggleJiggle]

Right, I'm about to be organised.

I want some way of keeping track of our income / expenses each month. Are there any good templates out there I can just zap onto my computer and use?

How do you do it?

Do you stockpile receipts all month and do it in one go or update it weekly or daily?

How do you record and plan for the one off things - insurance, car tax ?

Offset mortgage with Firstdirect.com

5 savings accounts and one current account.

Each saving account equates to a big thing - Birthdays, Christmas, Holidays, Cars, the final one is General savings.

Every penny we earn goes into the current account and then I go on line and transfer cash into the different pots, leaving enought in the joint account to cover month to month expenses & living.

All the pots are linked and the interest from every single penny in all of them is used to pay of mortage quicker.

On-line banking is the quickest way to get organised in my opinion.

There is a free budget planner on moneysavingexpert. I would recommend that you get out a year's worth of bills and bank statements and work out what you're spending now. I would also recommend that you do a spending diary for a month or so, where you write down every single penny that is spent. It allows you to find out where your money "leaks" are - things like magazines, coffee, lunches out - that are the reason why you take out £200 from the cash point every month and don't know where it goes. I'm a complete hypocrite though, as I've been promising myself that I'll do a spending diary again for almost a year, and I haven't yet. It is a good idea though!

The one off things you work out the yearly cost, and then divide by 12, by the way. In an ideal world, all those costs are then taken out of your bank account every month when you're paid and then you have the money ready when you need it (and some interest too).

I use Quicken but there are lots of other financial software packages out there.

One-off or irregular things (Christmas, holiday, car expenditure etc) I work out rough annual cost, divide by 12 and put this much in a savings account every month. I just use one account rather than lots of different ones, but keep a notebook where I jot down the total for each category.

Then during the year I take money from that account as spending arises for a particular category - so for example, by October my Christmas 'pot' is looking good, but the holiday 'pot' is low because we've just had our summer holiday and are just starting to rebuild that pot.

I go through receipts every week and update my Quicken account. I also do online banking once or twice a week just to check on things and make sure nothing's gone through that I don't know about.

Quicken has lots of budgeting and planning features to track your spending and target different financial goals too.

money saver is fab.

personally i:
write down income/out goings with repect to houshold bills.

all in one acount.

one acount for birthdays/xmas etc...in this goes money from change jar, money from 50p savings jar.

Collect Tesco club points and put to one side in an envelope for xmas food.
when i go to tesco, if i have any £1 coins on me, i get the savings stamps...for xmas. Ive got £40 since january, not a penny of it have i missed.

Every Sunday i meal plan and make a shopping list from this.
I spend between £22- £30 a week on food shopping.
Meal planner goes onto the fridge. works very well.

This money comes from what is left over from house hold bills.

We have a joint savings acount for holidays, we put £200 per month into this.
We have an Isa also.

we treat ourselves to a take away once a month. go out to tea maybe once a month.

you need to sit with paper and pen first.
Good luck

I use ordinary excel spreadsheet.

Two columns at the top, one adds up all the income, the other adds up regular outgoings. Savings, food budget and fuel budget are included here (childcare costs also, but we don't have these anymore). Next to the outgoings, I have a 'Next month' column so you can keep track of amounts that are going to change.

I have separate sheets set up (on tabs at the bottom), where I allocate the total budgets for food and fuel, then I deduct from these sheets asa and when we buy these things.

Then, set up formula to calculate total income less total regular outgoings. I call this 'Spends'. This is what you have left over each month. Think of any one-offs you know are coming up that month and deduct them here. Then, whenever you buy anything else, like clothes etc, deduct it here.

Another formula at the bottom for 'Spends' less items purchased gives you your 'Available funds'

I also have free text banking from First Direct and I use this to reconcile everything as it comes out of the bank. I have another column against everything that I put 'R's in. Then, when the bank statement arrives I know I've already checked it all.

Hope this makes sense.

Should have added: absolutely everything is on direct debits, including Christmas savings, for which we have a separate account.

Wow, great ideas. As one big task it sort of fazed me a little, but broken down into chunks I can probably deal with it.

I like the idea of a separate account to put all the little bits in each month (i.e. house insurance/12 months), so that its there when you need to draw on it.

At the moment, dh and I have our own accounts (not for any reason, just have never got around to joining them), but as he is the one earning, his account could be the 'day to day spending' one, and mine could become the 'saving up for the big expenses' account.

donbean...

'Every Sunday i meal plan and make a shopping list from this.
I spend between £22- £30 a week on food shopping.' (!!!)

Please please tell me your meals..seriously..how do you get this so low? where do you buy? does this include bread and milk? We are way in excess of this and have only 4 mouths to feed! It confirms what I already suspect..that we overspend on food (don't waste any..just get fatter!)

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thanks for this..a littleone2...it's really helpful. I will try some of the things you suggest