How do I make my own Budget?

Budgeting is not in our vocabulary for low-income earners. We have no plan, just to spend and pay some bills but for this article, let’s add some twists. Budgeting is not only for girls, boys can do it too. How do I make a budget for our 15-day expenses? Before I proceed, I have used a notebook, a budgeting app, and Excel. Yes, you heard it right.

These three tools are very useful for making a budget for your family and personal expenses. I have used Excel to monitor my 15-day salary and loan table. Both are in table form and are perfectly formulated to monitor your loans, dues, and salary.I will be sharing these formats with you very soon. For my daily expenses, I have used My Money. This budgeting app is very helpful for tracking your expenses so that you can understand where your hard-earned money goes. I use a notebook to record all of my loans just in case I accidentally delete my Excel files and to write down my dues for the upcoming cutoff. By the way, making a budget does not depend on the things you use or how you monitor your dues. It depends on how you follow your own budget. Using either a notebook, an app, or Excel is enough. Don't make things hard, make everything easy.

How do I make a budget? Here’s how: After the cutoff, I can now estimate my expected salary with the help of my Excel table. For those of us who work as private employees, our employer has 5 business working days after the cutoff before our salary is credited to our account. Right!

Based on my expected salary, I will first take down all of my priority bills and loan amortizations that will be due for this cutoff. After listing my bills such as water or electricity and loans due, I will mark these as online or cash. Online means I will be paying this through online and cash means I will be paying these dues through cash. Next, I will write down the expenses for my child such as milk, diapers, pay for his babysitter, and his 15-day allowance. I always separate my child’s expenses because they cover a big percentage of our salary. After taking down my highest priority bills and highest priority expenses, the remainder would be subdivided into my savings, personal expenses, and home expenses. I am saving 200 pesos weekly and paying for 20 pesos insurance weekly because I have an account in Card Bank. I have an allotment of 440 every cutoff. I will be sharing with you separately about the useful and positive part of having a Pledge Saving account in Card Bank Inc.

After removing the allotment from the remaining balance, I will list down all of our home expenses such as rice, gas, drinking water, sugar, coffee, kitchen ingredients, veggies, and other groceries. I will base my home expenses and personal allowance on my records at My Money app which is the budgeting app that I told you about earlier.

After paying all of my priority bills and dues, I will mark those as paid in my record notebook and in Excel table. This is for you to identify which dues are not yet paid. Make sure to include the reference payment number on your recording and secure your receipt from your loan amortization payments. This may help you in some cases.

After doing it all, say thank you. Thank you Lord for all your blessings.