Welcome to my 6 part series on creating a family budget. You can read the entire series or use the handy links below to navigating to a particular lesson. Thanks for reading Trees Full of Money! If you haven’t already done so, please consider subscribing to my free email newsletter or RSS Feed.
Table of Contents:
- Part 1: Introduction: Why You Need a Budget
- Part 2: Budget Spreadsheet: Download My Free Budget Spreadsheet
- Part 3: Step by Step Instructions for My Budget Spreadsheet
- Part 4: Tips for Reducing Your Monthly Expenses
- Part 5: Tips for Increasing Your Income
- Part 6: The Envelope System of Budgeting
Creating a household budget is one of the most important steps in achieving financial independence. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most difficult steps to take. Few people appreciate this fact better than me.
When I graduated college in 1999, it didn’t take long before I racked up over $90,000 in non-mortgage consumer debt. Our spending was out of control and my family and I were on the brink of financial collapse.
Desperate to turn our money issues around, we got our hands on every piece of personal finance literature we could to learn what we were doing wrong.
While each book, magazine, and website offered varying techniques of managing money and “getting ahead”, an overwhelming majority stressed the importance of writing up a household budget each month.
Through trial and error, my family and I adapted the best budgeting ideas we found and created a simple and effective household budgeting system that worked for us.
Two years later we were completely debt free, we had a solid emergency fund, and we were well on our way to saving a down payment for our first home.
In an attempt to “pay it forward”, I would like to share what we learned about developing a simple and effective household budget! I’ve even created a handy Excel based Budget Spreadsheet to assist with the process.
Each day next week (beginning Monday, March 8th) I will walk you through the process of how we effectively budgeted for our expenses and maximized the amount of money we had available to pay off debt, save, and eventually help purchase our first home!
I’m very excited about this series of posts and am confident you will find immense value in the content! If you know of someone who might benefit from this series please email them a link to my site! If you haven’t already, you may also wish to subscribe to my free email updates or RSS Feed to ensure you don’t miss any great content from Trees Full of Money!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Looking forward to it! I love budgeting, actually, and am always looking for ways to make my budgeting better and easier.
This is such a great idea! A week of directed budgeting lessons. Amazing!
I will give this a shot. My wife and I are not currently under any “official” budget, but I know my expenses and income. The missing link is putting something in writing and committing to using it. I hope to be able to do it next week…
I’m looking forward to this! I have always “budgeted” but I have never done a zero based budget like Dave Ramsey suggests. I am looking forward to your ideas and your spreadsheet. Also, thank you for responding to my question on whether or not you cancelled all of your credit cards. I am still debating on what to do. Thankfully my husband and I have a good credit score and I don’t want to mess that up with cancelling all of our accounts. Thank you for your insight and response. I really enjoy reading your blog and appreciate all the work you do for people like me.
Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed the series anna!