One of the most helpful things you can do to organise your life is start keeping track of your finances. Knowing exactly how much you’re earning and where exactly it’s going is hugely beneficial. But where do you start? It can seem like an impenetrable wall of numbers to start with but dont word, we’ve got you covered. 

Set Up A Basic Budget

The first thing you need to do is the very basics. There are apps that can help you set up a budget but really all you need is an excel spreadsheet or a google sheet to get started. Set up a fresh page for whatever month it currently is and In the first column track all of your income for that month. 

If you only have one income source this is easy, but remember that gifts, or tax rebates also count. Then in the second column track all of your expenses in the month. If you have a banking app it likely tracks all of your expenses on each card you have so go through the list and jot them all down on the budget.

With all this information you can start calculating some things. You can calculate your total expenses in the month by simply adding up all the expenses, and you can figure out how much money you have left at the end of the month by taking that total and taking it away from the total income. 

Sub Categories

When it comes to your budget however, the more information you can get on there the better. One avenue for extra information is sub categories. You’ve got all of the expenses listed, now you can sort them. Usual sub categories include: Bills, groceries, loans, and Entertainment. However depending on how exactly you spend your money you may be able to split it further. 

If for example you work on cars in your spare time you may have a category for tracking purchases that go towards the cars. With these subcategories set up you can actually calculate total percentages of how much of your monthly income goes towards individual categories, which can help you figure out exactly where you might be spending too much. 

Spending Limits

With all this you can start setting goals in place, and assign monthly limits to each category. These will be self enforced of course, but having a hard rule can help you save money by making you feel bad if you go over. Say you notice that entertainment purchases are taking up a lot of the monthly budget, maybe you test out a $100 monthly maximum and see how it works out?