Two Must-Have Methods for Evaluating Your Budget

If you do nothing else when it comes to testing your budget, incorporating these two methods will help you in determining your adherence to your budget.  It will turn the light on to the things that are “budget busters.”

Put it on paper.  If you are a spreadsheet person, use it.  If you like Microsoft Money or Intuit’s Quicken then use that.  But get your expenses together where you can see them.  There’s nothing more revealing than to look at those items that add up over time and show patterns that must be addressed.

Do you eat out too much?  Change it.  Are you late on credit card payments?  Adjust your payment times in the month.  And so on.

One month of evaluation will show you where you can save by cutting back.  Or, even better, spread out your expenses so that your bill paying does not occur at the same time which can be equally as devastating.

The best budget is one that is flexible – especially at the beginning of the process.  Making changes that allow for on-time payments and wise distribution of money to savings and investing will go a long way to making financial bliss attainable.

Keep your receipts.  This is another technique that will help show spending trends.  Plus, you should keep your receipts for match-up with the statements that arrive in the mail.

It is a wise consumer who makes sure that the charges on their credit card bill match their receipts.  There are unscrupulous persons out there who might do nasty things like jack up your tip amount when they run credit card finalizations after you have left the restaurant and even those who might charge you twice and claim that it was an error.  If you do not know that these exist because you do not match your receipts, and you do not pay attention to your statement, you might miss them.  And trying to dispute them later will be almost impossible.

Keeping receipts also means that if you need a repair on an item, you can access the receipt to show proof of purchase.  In some places this is the only method to initiating a warranty repair.  In others, it is needed to provide the date on which the item was purchased, even though if you sent in a warranty card, the date was probably entered there.  It never hurts to have backup like a receipt.  It is the gold standard for proof of purchase.

If you use these two methods you will be better at money management.