How To Make A Personal Budget

By: Laurie Tam

Break Studios Contributing Writer

When it comes to personal finance, it would be smart to learn how to make a personal budget. Most people who fail to set a budget for themselves end up suffering financially. However, keeping up with your finance is a smart move which can help you to prosper financially. If you need to stick to a budget, here are some ideas to add to your current list.

  1. Know what your monthly net income is after tax. If you are an employee, your employer makes this easier on you but as a self employed person, take away about 34% of it to get your net income. It is one of the ways to make a personal budget.
  2. Gather all the bills. If you have all the bills scatter everywhere, it’s time to get organize on how to make a personal budget. Do not leave them on the table and stack them inside like a box or something where all the bills belong.
  3. Know where all your money goes each month. You need to see what your regular monthly bills and separate that from non monthly bills.
  4. Write down your monthly expenses. It is important to write down your regular monthly bills in order to make a personal budget to work for you. And by writing it down, you would be able to track things better.
  5. Cut out and reduce your monthly expenses. What areas can you cut corners to save more money? For example, your cell phone bill. If you do not use your cell phone that often, you can either eliminate or get a cheaper plan.
  6. Figure how you can save some money for retirement. After you figure out your monthly income to take away from your expenses, think about retirement accounts to stick some of the money in such as high yield savings account or Roth IRA which is pretty attractive to do. Not many people think about this stuff in order to make a personal budget to work in your favor.
  7. Divide some leftover money on what you want to buy and donate. The last thing to do is to be able to save some to get whatever you want but can’t go over that amount and the other half as a possibility to donate some money for needy causes in your local area. It is one of the ways to learn how to make a personal budget to work for you where if you donate some money, you are showing thanks for what you got.
Posted on: May. 12, 2010