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Your budget to the rescue!
Christy
Heady • Bankrate.com
Make a financial plan -- and get a financial life.
Unless we light a firecracker and place it under your
chair, the only way we can motivate you to keep track of where your
money goes is to scare you. So here goes. If you don't track where
all your money goes, what will happen? Over time, the following
things will happen: you'll wind up in the cold month of January
wondering how the heck you spent $2,769 on Christmas presents for
the family, you'll know your banker better than you'd like because
you'll probably bounce checks all over town as a result of mismanaging
your finances, and someday you'll live on a monthly Social Security
benefit check of $455 (that's it!) because you piddled all your
money down the drain when you were young. Does that scare you? It
should!
"Budget" is a scary word; it's too constrictive for
some folks. What you need to understand, however, is that everybody
needs to have a daily record of where all their money goes. Accept
it and motivate yourself toward the feeling of accomplishment. The
true reward of having a budget is something all Americans want:
control. Imagine having control over all of your finances. Once
you do, you can reach your dreams and financial goals even faster!
Get and stay organized
Yuck. Paperwork. Not anymore -- welcome to the world
of technology! You don't have to be a computer nerd to take advantage
of the infinite number of financial software packages available.
Without sounding like cheerleaders, we think they're great tools
to help you on your way to organization.
The key to establishing (and maintaining) a budget
is to stay organized. You can go the filing-cabinet-and-ledger
route, of course. On the other hand, a number of financial software
packages available to help you along your way. You can create a
budget, track your expenses, and create and monitor an investment
portfolio. You can also project your budgets on an annual basis
and complete your income tax returns.
TIP: If you don't always have access to a computer,
an alternative to creating a "paper budget" is to make your own
using the categories listed in the expenses section of this chapter.
Also available is The Budget Kit for $15.95, which gives step-by-step
instructions on how to create specific budget categories tailored
to your personal finances and how to monitor your monthly expenses.
Call (800) 322-8621 for more information.
Here's a list of the top three most popular packages:
Quicken is probably the most popular financial software
package available. This program allows you to do more than balance
your checkbook; you can create a home inventory worksheet for insurance
purposes, project estimated tax payments, and place investment trades
with the use of a modem. Quicken is available through computer stores,
warehouse clubs, and other discount stores nationwide.
Andrew Tobias' Managing Your Money is a financial
software package with which you can perform basic financial planning
tasks such as balancing your checkbook and creating budget categories.
Also, with the use of a modem, you can retrieve stock quotes from
its online service.
Posted: May 21, 1998
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