Once we already had well organized personal finance management with several short term and long term goals, personal finance budgeting will be another story to do. Whatever our job, whether professional, employee, businessman, usually we get our income in monthly basis. Self employed person may take some portion of daily profit to cover their daily household expenses, but the best method to organize our fund is only by making separation between revenue from business (which is earned every day) and set up our monthly household budget (by set aside some specific amount from business profit once a month).

Let assume we have organized our income to be generated once a month. We have several needs and goals and must allocate our income based on them. Based on their urgency and significance, usually people organize their expenses from very routine ones to un-routine household expenses.

At the first line is regular monthly household expenses, followed by allocation for credit card and other credit payments. Education of children will be on third priority, and after that can be continued by routine entertainment, retirement saving, vacation saving, and so on.

As income and expenses already well estimated before, then we are sure that our monthly income will be able to cover our monthly household expenses including several particular savings. Yes, we have done a good personal finance budgeting !

Now, what we have to do is making some systematic budgeting to implement or personal finances planning. In accordance with that, there is financial advice as described below:

• Arrange allocation at the beginning of the month when we just received our monthly income, and make sure that all is balance for incoming month. For this purpose, we have to check our credit card incoming bill and plan the amount of payment for this month. Also scrutinize whether there is un-routine household expenses or not. For instance, child education will need additional expenditure in specific months such as purchasing of new books, two times monthly school fee before school vacation, etc.

• Don’t wait to pay all credit installment or credit card bills until their payment due date, but pay them at the beginning of the month when we receive our monthly income.

• Make weekly review at the end of every week. Just spend one hour of our valuable time on the week end to check all household expenses. In this part, sometimes we will find too much expenditure of the week compared with planned expenditure. With this review, we assure ourselves that our implementation of budgeting still on their track.

• If possible, please keep any receipt of every expenditure transaction. This will help us to trace all expenditure when we do our weekly review. For several not significant amount of regular expenditure, just provide some petty cash in our pocket at the beginning of the month, and we can check remained amount of our petty cash every week.

• Make monthly review at the end of the month, check realization of our personal finance budgeting of the month, whether it’s in line with the planning or not. If not, we can mark several unexpected expenditure which increase the budget amount, and find that such expenditure is really important expenditure. If excess expenditure is coming from un-necessary things, take it as a learning for up coming month’s budgeting (I understand that control our lifestyle is not an easy job, but just try to do our best for that).

By implementing this financial advice, we will be able to do systematic personal finance budgeting as a part of general personal finances matter, and as the result we can control the track of our monthly expenditure, to make it as close as possible with our planning.

Tags: financial advice, Household budget, household expenses, Personal Finance Budgeting, Personal Finance Management

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