madmama

In the last post I mentioned keeping a money diary.  Now, I’ll get into a bit more detail about it.  As I said before, it is uber important to get prepared.  If those bills creep up on you or if you have an unexpected emergency expenditure to take care of, being prepared will ensure that you don’t need to panic.  It can take a while to get organised so don’t put undue pressure on yourself.  Take things slowly and you will get there, I promise.

The money diary has a number of uses.  Remember I said to use two pages per day?  That’s because one page is a reminder page.  Anything that needs to be done can be listed here.  Appointments, outstanding bills, reminders to look for quotes, etc.  If you have to look at that list every day then you will never “forget”  a bill.  Plus there is an odd sense of satisfaction when you can cross an item off the list.  Another thing I like to is to keep track of loans.  Every time I pay something off a loan, I can deduct it from the loan amount in my money diary.  It really makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere.  I’m all about the positive reinforcement baby!

Keep a page at the start of the diary and write in the dates of direct debits and standing orders.  This way, you will never forget when a sum is about to be released from your bank account and you will know not to withdraw too much money from your account at that time.  You might not think it’s that big a deal but when you miss standing orders and the like the bank charges you a fee.  No need to pay extra fees when you don’t have to so try not to miss those direct debits!  To get an accurate account of what is going out of your account and exactly when, it’s a good idea to get regular bank statements and keep them in your money diary.  Looking at these statements can help you reconcile your figures and also help you decide where you can save money.  For example, you can transfer your account to a bank that enforces no bank changes on current accounts and even better a bank that grants interest on current accounts. 

So, as you are getting used to watching your expenditures, you are also keeping an eye on incoming bills.  You’re well on the way to starting a household budget that you can stick to. 

As I said before, the second page keeps note of your expenditures in a day.  The easiest way to do this is to account for the amount of cash you have in hand at the beginning of each day.   Log each time you spend any of this cash into your money diary.  If you withdraw money add it in the diary.  If you spend money, minus it in the diary.  Easy peasy.  Be exact though because you will have to go over this again later.  Keep receipts, keep receipts, keep receipts.  At the end of the day, jot down the amount of cash in your hand, throw your change into your savings jar.  Next day, begin it all over again…

Next time I’ll be talking about the pure evilness that is credit…

Trackback URI | Comments RSS