BUDGETING

Tracking Your Budget

One of the ways to manage a healthy financial lifestyle is to have a budget plan that works for you and your family. A good budget allows you to spend comfortably while saving for the important things in life like your dream home, a new car, children, education, and even retirement. After creating a budget that is structured around your current life and caters to your goals and aspirations, the next step is knowing how to track your budget. Being able to strictly and successfully follow a budget takes practice and patience. Having a system in place will help you to follow your financial strategy.

Documents and templates

Documenting allows you to review each month what areas went well and where there may be room for improvement. This means you need to be flexible to make changes along the way. The simplest way to do this is creating a document you can quickly input monthly expenses and savings. This can be done by creating your own excel document or even downloading budgeting templates and worksheets. When creating your own document to follow you will want to make sure you are consistently tracking. There is also the envelope method. This method tracks by separating funds for various purposes in individual envelopes to control spending and savings.

Digital tools

If you are someone who would rather not have to manually input information each month, digital tools may be a better option for you. There are apps and online automated budgeting systems that can make following a plan system simple and convenient. Some of the features include automatically allocating the amount of spendable money and savings, tracking your income and expenses, and even capturing and saving receipts. While these features are supportive there may be a monthly fee to organize all of your data. You will also want to consider the complexity of your monthly expenses to help determine which digital source is best for you to use.

Stay on track

After successfully creating your budget plan the next step will be executing your strategy each month. Having a system will make it easier to stay consistent. There are several different methods of tracking. Pen and paper, excel documents, templates and worksheets, or even digital assistance. Research them all to make a decision on what method will work best for you.