Home Organization Tools To Fix Your Budget

One of the first home organization tools you need in order to fix your budget is a way to track your money. There are inexpensive or even free tools to help you do this. Quickenonline.com offers a free online budget tracker to help you keep track of all of your money. You can also easily setup a budget tracker in Microsoft Excel. If you do online banking, you can download a copy of your statements into Excel and assign categories to all of your expenses.

So now that you have a way to track your money, the next of the home organization tools that you will need is a specific spending plan. This means that you decide on exactly what you want to/should spend on each category in your budget. Some things will be obvious and fixed expenses: mortgage, fixed loan payments like school loans or home equity loans, internet service provider, cable, trash, water, electricity, etc. I think you get the idea.

But then there are areas of your budget that fall more in the flexible spending categories. For me personally, this includes: groceries, entertainment, eating out, clothing, and some business expenses. I put groceries in this category because if I only buy what I absolutely need, I can cut my grocery bill significantly each month. I once fed myself and my daughter on less than $100 during a month (and that included eating out!). It required looking for bargains and resisting the urge to impulse buy things that I did not need. Not easy but not impossible either.

And perhaps the most important of the home organization tools to have in your toolbox: consistency. This means both consistency with tracking your money and consistency with staying on budget in all areas. If you expect to use your money wisely, you need to know how you are using it. The only way that will happen is by consistently tracking where your money is being spent. This is not always easy and can even be a bit uncomfortable. When you start knowing exactly where your money is going every month, buying that extra blouse or that additional meal out can become an uncomfortable experience because you know that it is not in your budget. Stay consistent in both tracking your money and how you spend your money.