This is a key element of budgetary control for any family. Before you work out the collective costs of running a household, you’ll need to gather all statements and bills. These will be considered as essentials so will include utility bills, credit card, loan or catalogue repayments etc. Food and clothing can’t really be considered in the same context as a choice is made of whether or not to spend a lot of money or a little amount of money.

Once you know how much is being paid out periodically within each payment category a common denominator has to be found, for example, you may pay your phone bill on a quarterly basis, your catalogue bill on a monthly contract, and your magazine subscription fortnightly. As they are all paid over different time periods, then you will find it easier to control these cost if you work out the costs within one single time frame, say a month, thus the one month period becomes the common denominator.

Therefore the way you calculate the catalogue bill will be the same, you would need to divide the phone bill by three, and the multiply the magazine subscription by two. You can place these within a budget worksheet which you can FREELY download by clicking here. ( For more details please click here).

This is an essential family budget tip. Honesty is definitely the best policy when undertaking budgeting. If you are not honest with the amount of money you are spending then your monetary control efforts will be inaccurate, rendering the process futile.

A personal budget, yes you guessed it, should involve all family members, well, those family members who are old enough to understand what is going on.

If all the people who are contributing to the overall running costs of the home are involved in negotiations, they will have extra impetus in sticking to the new set of restrictions. They may even come up with new ideas to improve the cash situation, as well as the overall good housekeeping process. Again honesty in this situation is paramount.

You could take this further if your financial situation calls for it. Contact creditors and re-negotiate repayments, some may oblige, others may not, but it’s worth a try, after all they would rather get their money than not.

When creating a personal budget don’t bite off more than you can chew, by creating unrealistic targets which you will impossible to stick to. All this will do is make you disheartened and you’ll end up back at square one.

Every now and again your circumstances may change, you may become more affluent through a pay rise at work, or more drastically your partner may lose their job, but what ever the situation the budgeting process should remain flexible, in order for future revision to take place.

For all anticipated expenditure a limit should be set. certain expenditure such as mortgage repayments is already pre-defined, but controllable costs such as telephone, leisure and clothing should always be prescribed a spending limit. As you’ve seen before, these figures need to be realistic, and must be set not too high or too low.

A good system is to award each controllable cost a weighting, say, food can have weighting of 30 %, clothing 10 %, treats 10 %, savings account 10 % and so on. This system should be based on importance, with the most important cost being allocated the highest weighting and the least important the lowest.

When the set of weightings have been allocated you’ll multiply the percentage figure for each by the money left over (after each non-controllable cost has been catered for).

Example

Net income after non-controllable costs have been paid = £1000

In order for you to stick to the budget you’ll need to set some money aside for days/nights out, but only as long as you keep within the confines of the overall budget, after all, all work and no play is no good for anybody. This family budget tip should make it a little easier for you to stick to it.

Let’s re-cap the seven main family budget tips in order to maintain your budgeting efforts are.

Download PDF Budget Planner file here

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