How to analyse your spending and why you need it

When you first decide that you may need to structure your finances and get more control over it you very quickly discover that the corner stone of successful budget is a good understanding of your pending patterns.

When I first started I thought it will be easy! How can I not know what I spend?!

Well, the truth was – I actually had no idea… I knew the end result documented on the month end in a fat overdraft but I had no idea how it came about!

I’ve tried several things and none worked in isolation but together they helped me a lot – so here I am sharing my experience with you!

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Step by step of your first budget - What Would I Do Differently?

I am now in our second month of living adhering to a budget that I’ve set up. Some lessons I learned so far moved me to write this post.

Knowing what I know now – how would I set up my very first budget?

1. Collect / download itemised bank statements for the last two months

2. I would still ask a friend to help me identifying actual spend based on 2 months of bank statements. It’s way too easy to trick yourself into declaring some of your spending a one off or simply “not seeing” them – you need a help of an outsider!

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No, You Don't Need a Large Emergency Fund - or Convince me That I am Wrong!

I recently have written a post about the myth and fallacy of an emergency fund and why I don’t want to have one. This led to a lot of discussion and a lot of people disagreed with my view.
I have just completed a guest post for Penny’s blog about MBTI type and their attitude to money and while researching for that post I also came across an interesting study about the link between the MBTI type and risk.
Since Emergency funds are all about mitigating risks and hedging your bets looking at MBTI type made sense.
Sonya Zichy conducted a survey asking participants about their investment preferences.

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Finances and Economy in Pictures

This Friday it's all about InfoGraphics. It's amazing how the good ones are able to convey a lot of information in a single picture!

Click on the graphic for larger sizer and better resolution image.

Economy and Unemployment

The Geography of Recession

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Higher Education and its Costs

Get smarter with your money, get updates straight to YOUR EMAIL or RSS Feed now!

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What Budgeting can Learn from Dieting

Getting spending under control has something very similar to loosing weight. Spending money gives us a "good mood" kick as a piece of chocolate does too. As with dieting - budgeting is all about helping spend less than you earn (eat less than you normally would), it's about identifying why you overspend (overeat), what triggers your behaviour and what to do about it.

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16 Steps to Your Most Successful Budget Ever

DO NOT START WITH EXPENSES – START WITH YOUR GOALS

The reason why so many people abandon their budgeting ambitions after just a few weeks is because they have been advised to do it in a logical but unfortunately uninspiring way.
Personal budgeting looks like another branch of accounting and financial forecasting but actually it is much more about personal development, self-awareness and pure psychology.

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The Myth About an Emergency Fund and Why You don’t Need One

Read any blog, web site or book dealing with personal finances and you are bound to find one or many pages written about the necessity of having an EMERGENCY fund … The advice ranges from few hundret to start with to the equivalent of 6-12 months expenses.

Continue searching and reading comments on this topic and you will soon discover that most people don’t have such a fund and those who try to have one struggle with: defining its size, knowing when to use it, keeping paying into it in the longer run.

And is if it was not enough there are further considerations like: do I pay into an emergency fund or do I re-pay my debt first? Do I have to have it in cash or in one of mine accounts? What is more important my emergency fund or my retirement fund?

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Which Budget Personality Are You? 13 Questions to Help You Choose

What would you prefer? A quick test to help you pick the right budgeting tool

Here is a quick test I’ve created to help you match your approach to budgeting and the tools available to you.

Answer each question assigning a value from 1 to 9 with 1 being least important (or least true) statement and 9 – most important one, than total the score and read the description at the bottom of this post:

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Budget: 15 Most Popular Budgeting Sites on the Internet this Week

I am not blogging on weekends, so to give you something to look at, read and try out in the next two days I have put together a list of the most popular sites with recent help tips, free stools and helpful ideas about and around budgeting. That's what the internet world is liking at the moment.
In addition to 16 Budgeting Sites I've published last week, have a look at these:

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Carnival of Personal Finance – Support Haiti Edition

I am very please that my recent post about Budgeting has been accepted into the current Personal Finance carnival, this time being hosted by Million Dollar Journey.

It is a clearly written, accurate, informative, not over-selling an idea, just telling you what you need to know blog about personal finance and investment from Canada.

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Discover Your Personal Model of Success in 10 minutes

Let’s have a look at what success means for you and what do you REALLY want?

Once you’ve identified what type of success you really want and what underling values fuel your motivation you than also can identify how your money spending behaviours tie in with the overall picture and hence it should become easier to adjust them if you need.

Your definition of success is likely to fall into one of the following three categories:

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How to Find Out If You Can Afford Your Job

I've been inspired by the power of financial visualisation.

So, below is a pretty picture of how many days in a month me and my husband need to work to pay for our living. The most depressing part of the picture below is that it takes us 9 working days each month to earn enough to be able to ... well, go to work!

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Budget: 16 Gold Nuggets of Budgeting

I've spent a considerable amount of time finding out as much as I could about budgeting before I actually created one.

So I thought, others may find it useful  if I shared what I’ve learned while researching this topic for myself.

Couple of  things I want to point out before diving into the bottomless topic of budgets. I have:

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Debt: the true Cost of Christmas

The new numbers are in: Almost 4 million people in the UK have already gone into debt to pay for Christmas this year (aka in 2010!), according to research released today by R3, the insolvency trade body.

The research also finds that

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Personal Finance: 10 Sites to Get You Started

If you feel the time has come to sort out your finances consider following these easy steps. It is not a comprehensive list but something that I have tried out myself. This list focuses on basic steps that are very important to get right. It might take a day, but most likely to

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Numbers Crunching

It's hard to find out how much you spend in total each month ... Money seems to just disappear in cups of latte and ... well... staff ... I've tried several budgeting spreadsheets on the internet and found this one the most helpful. I used the offline version but there is an online one available as well.
I had to estimate a lot of expences and

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So, how much is it than?

Wherever you read about getting out of debt you will also read about budgeting, so here I was trying to find out how much we actually spend.

It was a huge surprise to me to find out that even though 100% of our bills and recurring payments are automated I still struggled to find out the overall spending!

I've tried everything:

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