Well hello everyone. I hope you are all doing fantastic. I’d like to focus today on your monthly budget. Aside from earning more income (which I covered in my July 2019 newsletter), knowing where your money goes is of paramount importance. While you can dissect credit card and bank statements monthly to manually calculate the budget, there are some great tools out there to help automate this. The downside is that you will need to invest some time to learn the tool. The upside is it gets easier with time AND the data will be air-tight. Here are my top 3 tools:
1) Tiller Money – https://www.tillerhq.com (I use this personally)
2) Mint – https://www.mint.com
3) YNAB – https://www.youneedabudget.com/
Categorizing expenses is really the name of the game here. You ideally want enough categories that you really can analyze your spending but not too many that it’s overwhelming. Here are some suggested categories (I like to keep it simple).
Expense Categories:
1) Charity
2) Education
3) Food
4) Gifts
5) Housing
6) Insurance
7) Medical
8) Products
9) Services
10) Transfers
11) Transportation
12) Travel
Happy budgeting!