Budget set-up

In order to create an effective personal budget you need to have planned it and then collected the data you can then use to make it achievable and reliable.

You can manage your money if you use either cash and/or card. Personally I think that using cash would limit me to spend less, however tracking what I spend and when is so easy with online banking and that is how I have chosen to operate in order to set up a budget.

This will discuss the online banking way to set up a budget.

First you can get your monthly statements downloaded from your bank online, save them as CSV (Comma delimited) which should open in Excel. I then copy the information from this file to a previously saved file which is used as a monthly cost analysis spreadsheet.

The best thing to do is to create headings underneath the statement, sort them into Income and Outgoings. Once you have the headings and have collated them make sure they add up to Debit and Credit columns respectively. Also then you would check that the Income minus the Outgoing total equals Closing balance minus Opening balance.

These are just methods of checking you have done it right.

Once you have done this for a few months you can then use that data to create your budget.