Nowadays we all live in the world of money. It doesn’t depend on our wish that financial relationships appear every day, for example buying in supermarkets or gasoline purchases. The competent managing of your finance is an indispensable skill of modern people. A big income is not necessary for life without longing for salary. You just need properly implement maintenance of the family budget.

The family budget is called like that for good reasons. Many people can easily divide their money due to their needs. But when you live with a family, this process is not quite easy task. And notice one thing: I don’t talk about total saving. There is the general main problem with time-management – the right division of resources but do not call it a refusal from things which you like.

A lot of people find out with surprising that they spend much money for the things which are not very necessary and these things are also undesirable. This fact becomes clear when people begin to control their spending.

The maintenance of a family budget does not restrict you, it helps you to understand where you spend your money and it also show new ways for the best investing of your income. Do you want for a long time to travel, to buy new things but you cannot save up? So, it means that you really need to study how to plan properly your finance.

Now let’s figure out more concretely in which way you can begin to make plans of spending.

Write down everything

First of all, you should decide where you will keep a record. Actually, it doesn’t matter if you choose an ordinary notebook or you will find a special intended program. The most important fact is your work. Do not be lazy. You should write down everything. However, to work with computer or mobile telephone is easier. These devices will help you to make reports and they will show you all details more fully. Even Excel will be suitable.

To put down incomes is not difficult. Such cash flows aren’t so often and not so fragmented to small sums. All difficulties are connected with spending. Sometimes one thought appears in a head: is it so much important not to forget to write down about order at the cafe during mealtimes?

But you have to mark every small buying. You will be shocked when you find out how much money you spend for useless things and unplanned events (very often we are not even aware about it).

You can put down your income and spending not every day but it should have a permanent basis. You need periodically to reconcile a real quantity of funds and the quantity that you have in record. Are there any divergence? If there are divergence, you’ve could forget something and now you should do correction.

Well, I think that maintenance of the family budget through the programs is more suitable and due to this reason I’m going to speak about them in more details.

Technique to help

I will begin with a simple variant – Excel. Of course, to add report of spending is quite difficult there. We can’t talk about automatization. However, thanks to built-in functions, you have an opportunity to withdraw general sums, to see percentages and draw up report. Then, I should say that the applications on the phone have a great precision, according to Cocker. What simple way – when you spend money you can immediately to put down it in the program.

Besides, the main feature is in the fact that the majority of applications can synchronize with banks or with got reports about operations (for example in SMS). With this function you need just divide spending cashless billings by the categories. Today we prefer cashless variant more often than cash hard one. It is very useful opportunity, isn’t it?

I call as examples such applications as:

Zen-Money, EasyFinance, Cash Organizer and many others.

There is only one disadvantage: many applications are not free. But you can try to use the program and to understand if the price of the application is fair. By the way, I have notice that more advanced functions have restrictions and you need not these functions at the beginning.

Planning of future cash flows

I remind you that the purpose of all your actions is not just to understand where you spend your money, as soon as you will see this point, you can save up money or invest it.

There are several approaches. The easiest one is division of certain percent from your incomes for saving up. Every month you get your salary and then you do not spend this sum for necessary everyday needs. In this variant and further – you should calculate the amount of percentage by yourself and it depends on your opportunities and desires.

I also recommend you another approach. You should divide your income into three parts:

• Money that will be spent for necessary needs: food, clothes, transport etc. You can’t avoid these spending.
• Saving up. This is percent that is taken and it is spent only for planned beforehand buying.
• A part for entertainment and unexpected things. This is money for different optional things and, in fact, you can abandon them. I talk about buying a book, evening in the bar; in other words they make you happy. It can be also something unexpected like repair of the car.

If you see that the last section is excessively big you can shift money to the saving up.

I can give a recommendation for people who do the investment: you should also create “working part” (money for investment in different projects). These funds will bring you another income.

You can also find a plenty of technique with different groups and classifications for divisions of your incomes. But one thing unites all of them – you have to find out how much money you should to spend for dignified (according to your opinion) life and how much money remains. Then you divide it for desirable spending, it doesn’t matter if you want to buy a fur coat or to go to the cinema.

I hope after reading this article you have understood that maintenance of the family budget is quite necessary thing for every person. Everyone decides what he or she uses for the maintenance of incomes and spending and how to do it. But the main point is realization of financial managing. I wish you good luck with this not easy matter.