anyone really organised financially?

[Booyhoo]

i used to be quite good with my money when i was a single parent. i knew pretty much where every penny was. but the past 2 years since i've been with OH our combined finances and the change in tax credits and household bills, i've lost the handle i had on things and we need to start organising things again so we actually have something to show for our hard work at the end of it all.

i've been reading the money doctor book to try and get an idea of what we need to sort but tbh i'm finding it all a bit overwhelming.

are any of you really organised and does it take up alot of your time? we need to do this but at the minute i'm just seeing lots of numbers.

I find using Microsoft Money really really useful. We plug in all our expenditure (just going through bank and credit card statements basically) and you can categorise everything and then really easily create reports (eg to find out how much you spend each month on the weekly shop, or the gas bill, or whatever). For a small amount of effort, it really reassures me. And means that if we want to spend a big amount then we do it in full knowledge of the state of our finances!

I am ave to be - but am a lone parent.

I ave an excel spreadsheet with income & exp on it, check online banking everyday AND have a white board.

if it tally's i'm happy. 2.5 years in, never been over drawn and all bills are paid - can't be bad. takes about 5 minutes a day but I do it every day thou - am sad - have no life!

see thats what i'm talking about. spreadsheets and the like. OH doesnt get excited about that sort of thing but i do.

thesouthbelle i was the same before OH. i had to be really organised and i was never overdrawn or getting charges. but now, even though i have more (OH's income) we seem to get a charge every few months.

do you have to pay for microsoft money wigeon ?

There is a free programme similar to Microsoft money, called Money Manager Ex

thanks lou

Can't actually remember if we paid for Microsoft Money - think it was already on the laptop when we bought the laptop, but in any case, I just googled it and found that it's apparently been discontinued. But the free one Lou suggests sounds good.

I think it is probably easier than doing spreadsheets as it calculates everything for you and is really easy to manipulate (eg if you want to only look at certain accounts, or over a certain time period, or expenditure on several different categories at once).

We upload all our statements about once a month and you can then check where all your money is going. It doesn't take that long at all.

i uploaded the one that lou linked to but it isnt allowing me to input any info. everything i hover over says void. have i done something wrong?

It may seem a bit obvious but doing your will is something that you should sort out if you haven't already. We had been meaning to do it since we had our first child but never got around to it until recently. Talking to friends with kids I realise that many don't have one. The other thing that we found really useful was to consolidate a number of our accounts. We had various ISA accounts and we decided to cash them in given the low interest rates and reduce our mortgage. That has given me immense satisfaction. We still need to get into a habit of monitoring our finances and I'm going to look at Money Manager as well.

Key things to ensure are

1. As MTC says, organise a will. It's really important, especially if you and OH are not married as he will not be considered next of kin.

1. Get a spreadsheet organised with all your accounts on it and tally up at the end of every month to ensure everything reconciles and that all your transfers have worked properly.

1. If you have savings, make sure you both utilise your ISA allowances every year- otherwise you're just giving free money to the tax man.

1. Consider getting a IFA to sense check your investments/ pension provision and make some suggestions. A lot of people dont save efficiently because they dont understand the different types of product. eg they use all their ISA allowances for cash ISA's rather than thinking about shares or bonds. He'll also be able to advise on pensions and whether its worth you paying into a private pension scheme.

5.Make sure you dont have some accounts in the red and some in the black. Pay off all debts before building savings. This is because interest on debt is always a higher rate than interest on savings so you actually lose money if (eg) you have a savings account but credit card debt.

My dp is extremely organised with money. It takes him about 30 minutes each week as he's got a finance package on the pc. He ALWAYS knows how much is in his account.

He'sTheOppositeOfMeTiggaxx

I tried to do the spreadsheet etc.. but it has never worked for us as a family.

So I have odne it another way.
Did the budget especially how is going out each month by DD
Put all the regular payment on DD (electricity, gas, morgage of course...)
Evaluate what is our budget for food each month.
Then, we have 2 credit cards (each of which is always paid in full at the end of the month).One for food only (so I can keep track of both how much I should spend each week and how much I have already spent in the month), one for all the other expenses. We know that we should not go over X amount. If we get close to that, we know we can't spend any money until the following month.

Also, any money left at the end of the month on our current account automatically goes in a saving account.

We have one easy access saving account with some emergency money on (for these 'just in case' type of situation like a car accident).

What we could be better at is planning for our pensions but atm there is not enough left at the end of the month to be able to do that.

We're pretty organised. We have our two salaries paid into a high interest holding account. Then from this account we have a weekly payment which comes into our normal current account.

This weekly payment covers all spending, bills etc and we worked it out based on what we could afford/normally spent, plus a little bit for emergencies.

Then out of the holding account, an amount goes into the offset mortgage and a chunk into our long term investment account.

Any extra in the current account that is left from spending, we allow to roll over to spend on bigger purchases. We also have regular amounts coming out of the current account for holiday saving and house renovations.

No credit card.

It took a while of tweaking to get the figures to work but we've been doing it for a year now and it works really well.

We also keep a spreadsheet of daily spending tallied into categories which makes us aware of what we spend.

I do realise this sounds horribly boring! But actually knowing that every time you go to the cashpoint the amount is exactly as you expect is really nice.