How To Make A Financial Budget Sheet For Your Family

Need to know how to make a financial budget sheet for your family? If writing out a budget sounds like a groan-inducing, eye-poking exercise, it doesn’t have to be. If you’ve ever looked at your paycheck and wondered where the money goes, it’s probably time to sharpen the pencil, stifle the groans, and put some financial controls in place. 

What You'll Need:

• Pen
• Paper

The Steps

1. Step one is to find out the truth about where your money disappears each month. Write down every expense over a two week period. Keep a pen and paper or record it on your smart phone. This will help you grasp the small expenses every month that kill many budgets.
   
2. Remember that some expenses like vacations, holidays, and car repairs don’t occur each month. You’ll need to add these into the budget so you aren’t surprised. Determine your budget for these items and create a monthly average. Add it to your monthly expenses.
3. Write out any expenses that you weren't able to track in your everyday living for two weeks. You'll need to be diligent to remember everything. List your mortgage or rent, insurance costs, utilities, personal care, and discretionary expenses such as cinema, dining out, and gifts.
   
4. Determine your monthly take home income. If this is a sliding scale look for an average month.
   
5. Once you’ve listed your income and expenses, it's time to examine your work and be honest: is there money left over at the end of the month? If so, it’s time to set up some automatic controls so this money ends up in your bank account. If possible, set up direct deposit for the surplus in your budget into a savings account. Make this account difficult to access--no ATM or easy transfers. You don’t want funds to go in Friday and come back out Saturday.
   
6. Use technology to help stick to a budget. Many websites, smart phone apps, and spreadsheets are available to make this easy. You'll want to make the family budget sheet easy to maintain so you'll stick to it.

Creating a budget isn’t the hard work-no payoff work it used to be. By tracking expenses diligently, using technology and setting up automatic savings, a good budget can make sure funds are there when you need it and cut you off when you’re going overboard with your spending habits.