Marry Christmas and happy new year.
It comes to me to share my knowledge with others, but I am sure some might know the steps in creating a budget, but it might be that they are not following it effectively. I hope if I share such knowledge, it will help a lot, especially in the season we are in now. I know that as we have already celebrated Christmas, we have spent much of our savings, which we are still going to spend more on when it comes to the New Year celebration, so I take this as a reason to share such information with others so others will not suffer, especially after all this celebration, so I will list and explain the steps in creating a budget.
The steps in the budget include
1. Determine your income: As the first step in creating a budget, you have to know your total income in terms of what you can afford. Do not write a budget that is more than your income and end up not achieving anything at the end because your income determines your budget, so let's take note of our income first. This income might include your weekly,monthly, or even yearly income, as well as side hustles and any other source of income.
2. Identify where your money is going: The second step in creating a budget is to track your expenses. This is also very important because, without knowing how you usually spend your money, you will end up writing a budget that you can’t even stick to. More over, expenses include housing, transportation, food, entertainment, gambling, and so on. When you have identified where your money is going, you can categorise it into groups. For instance, clothing, house rent fees, and others should all be in the category of housing. If that is done, you have definitely achieved your second step in creating a budget.
3. identify or set an achievable goal: This is the third step in creating a budget when you have identified your income, tracked your expenses, and categorised them. Why I say achievable goal is that you have to set a goal that you can achieve either long-term or short-term. For instance, you might save money in order to pay your debts, invest the money, or even pay for housing and any other expenses, such as buying valuable and usable items that won’t be a liability to you.
4. Start creating the budget or priorities for your expenses: This is the next step, for me. This is the step where you will start writing the budget. It is not that you won’t write those other steps I mentioned earlier; you will also write them, but this is the stage where you will allocate some amount of money to the categories that you have created at the second step, and you have to make sure that it aligns with your priorities. After allocating a certain amount of money to those categories, you should make sure that you keep some of it as emergency funds; it is also important.
5. Review the budget; in some cases, I mean monitoring, evaluation, or adjustment of the budget. This is like the final stage in creating a budget, although this stage is a continuous process because this stage never comes to an end unless you have purchased all that you have put in your budget to achieve this process, including regular adjustments as needed to accommodate and adjust your budget. This is done in case something comes up, such as the use of the emergency fund that you keep as a category for things like an increase in the price of what you intend to buy for medical expenses, which might be an emergency, and many others. In this step, you must track your budget very carefully and with caution to make sure you have achieved it.
The steps I have listed above are the ones I follow whenever I want to write a budget. You can change this step in many ways. For instance, a gambler can use it, but it will be more effective with the amount he needs for the gambling, and he should make sure he follows the track, so stick to the budget to avoid the source of unusual spending.
This is a very important thing to do especially now that we are experiencing financial crisis around the world. The new year is another opportunity to correct the errors we made the previous year and having a budget is one way of achieving that. The budget will make us have a sense of direction. While working hard for your money, the budget will help one to adequately distribute the earned money to effective use. Earning money is not just enough, but how you spend your money is something to be concerned about. If you spend well, you might be getting returns after every good expenditure but if you spend carelessly, that money spent is gone and gone for ever. last thing anyone would want to do next year is entering the year without a goal or a direction. If you fail to plan your life well, then you are obviously planning to fail. No more room for excuses, it's not too late to make that plan (budget).
