6 Simple steps to create your monthly budget

Feeling frazzled by the thought of number crunching?

Telling yourself you're crap with money?

Or that you'll do it this weekend only for it to move week after week and it never happens?!

These 6 steps make it easy for you to tiptoe into your money management with minimal work & stress.

Here's the overview and a link to the free guide & monthly calendar template for you to print as you like, A5 for your planner or A4 for your family binder or home office notice board.

You might like to do one step every few days or top up your coffee in between each. Depending on how long its been since you had a good sort out will mean the time it takes can vary between 10 minutes for each bit and 30.

You'll feel much better just having a go.

Ready?

1. Where are you now? What is your bank balance & what have the last 3-6 months looked like just before payday?

2. On your calendar, write on the correct day how much your income is. It could be from various sources and be on more than one date so write them all in. Maybe your future earnings are variable so take a good average. In the space provided enter your total for the month. Maybe each if you are a couple and a total household giving you 3 sets of totals if you like.

3. Now plot in all your essential expenses - great idea to do this in one colour if you're a visual person. Add these up & write in the space provided. If you're not sure what classifies as an essential make 2 columns on one bit of paper, I like to use the simple terminology as Needs vs Wants and write down everything you spend out on in either one of these columns. You might find this an interesting conversation...

4. And again in a different colour for your variable not so essential expenses aka your wants. These are all choice spends by comparison to the essentials.

5. What's left over? To think of this as profit can sometimes help your mindset. What do you plan to do with it? How are your savings looking?

6. Now you've got a picture on your current situation think a bit more long term - how do you want the next 3-6 months to look? What do you want to be doing, want to have or want to sort out? Do you want to generate extra income as well as streamline what you are paying out for so that you have more profit? And if the answer is yes then ask yourself why you want more profit, what will you do with it? And ask yourself why that is important - in fact keep asking yourself why until you are at the absolute root of what is really important to you.

Now, how do you feel?

Awareness is the first step and I bet if you're looking to make some changes you'll now be more consciously spending and keeping tabs on how much and what for.

My philosophy is that your budgeting starts & ends with you whilst the numbers are in the middle.

Money is a vehicle to get you from A-B so what is your "B"?

Here's your freebie link:

https://bit.ly/stepbysteptemplate

And if you want to start exploring done for you budgeting toolkits to dive in & get it done properly here are a couple to look at with more coming in the next few months - so do stay tuned!

Each has a 20+ page ebook that I wrote carefully considering the stage of life you are experiencing in the scenario so that it is going to fit you like your favourite jeans!

Have a fabulous bank holiday weekend, it's my birthday so I'll probably have a glass of bubbles in my hand for the majority of the next few days!

Cin cin, santé & cheers!

Love from Lucy x