Making Budgets

There is always a fine art of strategy at times when it comes to managing money. It's a very useful thing to have, that money is. Seems you can't live without it but you also cannot live with it at times. Since money doesn't grow on trees, it can also be gotten through asking or by somewhat of doing a job. While working for life certainly doesn't sound like much, at times it's all there is. Other times though, you will get to be a lot freer as money is spare. When this happens, some in the financial market are directed to save. Pocketing funds for later use during the hard times requires a great deal of discipline and outright sacrifice to get there. It isn't always easy. In fact, at times keeping this mindset can be very hard. Stuff happens in life and emergencies come demanding that the savings be used for that purpose. Still others live life believing that God will provide. These, either by choice or necessity, live paycheck to paycheck in the postmodern world. Perhaps as time goes on, all this will change as we get to be better about handling money. When deciding what to spend, let's first determine the available amount that is there. This should be the total of the salary or income or gift before any expenses are paid. It would look a little bit like this.

Total

Then you have other expenses to be paid known as bills. These come in various forms, shapes, and sizes. Most commonly owed bills are those of necessity such as

Electricity

Heating

Cooling

Rent

Phone bills

Internet use

Perhaps other bills such as transportation or entertainment are variable. Let's say for instance that you live in a high traffic area such as a city. You're walking distance to everything you need including your work. You likely won't need any transportation expenses. What if you live in the area surrounding the city but can find an alternate means of travel to walking. You likely can save on most transportation expenses like this except for one-time fees or maintenance to your chosen means of moving around. The same goes for entertainment related expenses. For instance, some people spend large amounts of money on tvs and cable each month. They consider this being entertained. Perhaps this isn't true entertainment but rather a form of it meant only to keep you annoyed. Entertainment can also be one or two old tv shows or movies kept carefully hid on a disc. These can be bought and sold at low cost and even fed into a player to make quite a nice entertainment. Up until now we have seen the secondary parts of the budget. Next though, comes the primary parts of the budget which concern the following parts.

Food

Clothes

Shelter

Water

Sanitation

Perhaps sanitation shouldn't be considered part of the budget. Actually, it's a function of health. If however, you don't have a good sanitation routine in place, making one should be the next best thing. Out of all the above, food and shelter expenses are generally considered to be the most important. If however, you have nothing to wear, this takes very high priority apparently, as it's what is considered a dignity expense. Shelter would also be considered a dignity expense due to the large place it occupies in the mind and the high amount of distress it causes when left out. What you're left with for immediate expenses are the food and the water. Now, that we have looked at expense reducing all the categories, let's see what a sample budget creation would look like.

Total minus expenses makes what is left. For instance, should you have a sample budget of oh, 1,000 in your currency. How should that be spent?

1,000 total

_________

400 food and water

30 internet and mobile

200 shelter

50 clothes

100 heating and cooling

100 electricity

50 transport

____________

930 total in bills minus 1000 total in funds makes 70 in funds left over remaining