Personal Budget Directions

Pay your bills once a month.  Keep all paychecks and bills in a pile at home and in one feel swoop, pay all your bills, deposit your checks and fill out your “Personal Family Budget” all in about 2 hrs per month!

Column 1 Name of Bills: represents the bills you have in a given month.  There are empty spaces, so if you have an odd expense that doesn’t fit a category, simply write it in.

Column 2 Monthly Owed Minimum: determines how much you need in order to survive in any given month.  Fill in this section with the bills you MUST pay.  For example, the minimum payment on your credit cards, your house payment, car payment etc.  Luxury items or items you could do without do not go in this column (vacation expenses, down payment on new cars etc.).

Column 3 Monthly Total Paid: represents all the checks or withdrawals you made from your checking account that calendar month.  A simple way to do this is to look in your check book and write all checks and ATM withdrawals under column 3.  When added up, this represents the total checks wrote that month.

Column 4 Amount Saved: represents any money saved.  We count savings as one of the three things: extra money paid on your mortgage, money that went into a retirement account or money you sent to your financial planner to invest in stocks, mutual funds or bonds.

Column 5 Total Paychecks: records all checks you deposited that month into your checking account.  This includes your net paychecks, refund checks you may have received, child support, alimony, checks from rentals etc.

The only rule to this form is that Column 3 must equal Column 5. The reason for this is we want to account for all money in our checking account every month.  If there is extra money in our checking account, the only way we can get them to balance is to write a check to our financial planner, our retirement account, pay extra on our mortgage or Money Market.  The greatest reason people don’t save is because they don’t track their finances and when you don’t track, money disappears!!

Your Money Market Account is your emergency account.  Maintain 3 months worth of your survival number in this account.  If your survival number is $4,000, you should maintain about a $12,000 balance in your Money Market Account.

Your net worth column keeps you aware of how close you are to retirement.  If you know you need $700,000 in net worth to retire, you will always know how close you are!!  Make copies of the personal budgets inside and use the examples as your guide.

Wealthy people pay attention and create regular habits that create long-term success