This year I am taking my blog in a new direction, still beauty, but I want to include the new interest, saving money including creating a budget, making money and general tips.
We are now, as a household, trying to give ourselves the opportunity to save for things we want to do, stay debt free and potentially pay our mortgage off early, without actually losing out on the stuff we love.
So, alongside a new YouTube channel, I have decided to do a series on money that hopefully you will enjoy.
This blog post is about my top 5 tips for creating a budget in your household.
1. Being Honest about Income and Outgoings
Write down everything, from that regular takeaway latte to your prescriptions and work out what it is you have outgoing from your income each month.
Make sure you include all bills and any other regular payments that you either have to pay for. For example, I go to a choir each week which I pay subs to. I have to include that too even though it’s not essential spending.
We created a spreadsheet which has our income and our outgoings and then other things we want to include.
The spreadsheet is ‘live’ on google sheets so we can access it anywhere online and make amendments where necessary.
Working this out this way has given us an accurate look at what we have left at the end of the month.
2. Stop Wasting / Get what you need not what you want
I hate waste!
The other day I hadn’t taken note of when all the fresh meat was going to be out of date and when I went to use some I realised everything was on a shorter date than expected so had to throw it all out. I might as well have taken a £20 note and thrown it away.
We decided that we would be really careful about things like this and started using a whiteboard which has the days of the week on it and plan our meals for the week on that.
We have a pantry full of stuff that needs using and a freezer too. By doing a meal plan we can use what we have and work out what we need. Not only does this ensure we don’t throw anything away but we can also budget for it.
This leads me on to the next point.
3. Pay with cash – once it’s gone it’s gone
We have budgeted for our shopping for each week so we have decided to put cash in separate envelopes. 1 envelope per week. The cash in the envelopes can only be spent on each week. This will definitely help us not to go for impulse purchases and if we under spend we can put it straight in to savings.
4. Use Internet Banking to help you budget
I recently changed banks and have found that my current internet banking is really simple to use and has some brilliant benefits.
The biggest benefit is the eSavings accounts you can open. These accounts need to be opened with £1. The interest rate for saving isn’t that good anyway so it’s a brilliant way to move money around quickly.
You can rename your accounts so I have named mine Emergency, Car, Gifts and Beauty. Each time I sell some makeup from my stash I put the money straight from paypal in to my current account and send the money over to the Beauty savings account. It’s quite like having money saving folders.
This has been a great way to organise money. And, if I really need the money I can transfer it in seconds via the app to my current account and use it.
Also it makes my card safe. If someone wanted to take money for whatever reason by cloning my card, it would be great to have a small amount rather than my whole salary after bills.
5. Check your bills and change where possible
Regularly check your utilities and TV bills and make amendments where possible.
We have Sky and noted we weren’t using the whole package we were paying for. a few phone calls later and we had £28 reduced of the monthly bill. We then sent a cancel my broadband and they reduced our bill by £10.
A saving of £38 per month, which in a year saves us £456 in a year which would pay for our holiday rental for a week or for Christmas presents.
There you have it.
The 5 tips I can give you to budgeting in your household.
Have you got any tips you would like to share?
