6 tips for improving your family budget

In order to be able to draw up a budget of incomes and expenses as accurately as possible, it is best to keep our daily records of spendings so we don’t omit anything. That’s why we can use more tools, either to write daily spending on an agenda at the end of each day, or to use an app on your mobile phone that you have at your fingertips at any time, and we can write down the expenses as we perform them, either use an excel file, so we can personalize it to fit our needs better.

•  A great deal of daily spendings goes on various occasions, such as snacks during the day or city walks to a coffee. Do not omit to keep track of these costs because at the end of the month you will realize that they will weigh heavily in the budget and you will wonder where the difference is.
•  For a better financial discipline, it is a good idea first to achieve a forecasted revenue and expenditure budget and then to draw up the budget actually made to figure out what is the difference between estimates and reality, and so you can improve your financial behavior. The forecasted budget can also be considered a target for your budget and try to fit into it.
• Every month, the first expenses we have to make are the ones for our future, this are the sums allocated to savings and investments. After making sure that we first saved the amounts proposed, we can only then make the fixed costs that if we omit them in a month they will attract interest and penalties. Finally, we can allocate the difference for variable expenses.
• As with fixed costs, to ensure that we do not postpone savings by the end of the month to see if we still have resources available for them, we can set automatic payments to our savings or investment accounts and so we will have better and better financial results.
• To ensure that unforeseen expenses do not affect your monthly budget, it is advisable to have an emergency fund of at least 3-6 salaries that you can use only in emergency situations. This way, you will surely know that no matter if your car breaks down or you have an urgent medical problem, you will be able to resolve it without borrowing or delaying until you have the financial resources to solve the problem.
• To improve spendings, try to divide them into expenditures that represent needs and expenses that are wishes. Start budgeting all the time by analyzing your wishes and see which ones can be eliminated for better long-term results.

Ultimately, the purpose of our revenue and expenditure budget is to manage our financial resources more efficiently. It is important, after realizing the family budget over a period of several months, to analyze its evolution in order to improve our financial behavior in terms of cost reduction in order to save more and ultimately invest in order to reach our established financial goals more quickly.