A family budget is a statement that shows how family income is spent on various items of expenditure on necessaries, comforts, luxuries, and other cultural wants. In simple words, a family budget is a record of what you earn, spend and save.
It is very important to have a budget, sticking to it by analyzing at every month’s end, to keep your family happy, healthy, and stress-free. Here are the, 3 questions to ask when analyzing a budget as a beginner.
The budgeting question to ask: What do I need to stop doing when it comes to my money?
The first question you ask yourself at the end of each month is, what do I need to stop, right? And one way that you can figure out what you need to stop is by preparing a statement of your spending that same month.
So when I work with my clients one on one in my money coaching services, we would look over their bank and credit card statements from that month, and then we can see how much they spent for food, how much they spent on beauty.
And so that’s a good exercise for you to do. When it comes to our groceries, we like to eat well; we like to splurge a little bit when it comes to our grocery. The monthly family meeting we had this month, what we actually wrote down, was that we need to decide and just get two fancy meals a week rather than getting so many fancy meals, right? Because we want to eat the shrimp, we want the steak, we want the mussels, we want all these things in one week, and it’s like okay, let’s cut that down have some regular meals in there too, and then we can get two fancy meals, and that has helped our budget tremendously.
Tools that we use in our family meeting, I put them inside of my Hero In Your Finances: 12 -month Finance Workbook And Growth Planner. So if you guys haven’t picked up a copy, it comes in a digital version and a print version. And we also found a cheaper store to get some items from, so we’re splitting where we’re going food shopping. We’re getting the bulk of our stuff from one store, that’s a little bit more pricey, but it has quality food, and then we’re getting the other rest of our stuff from another store that’s a little bit cheaper, which is Aldi.
Our friend introduced us Aldi, and we loved it so far, so now we’re just kind of splitting up our shopping trips, which has helped us save some money in our groceries.
The second question to ask when it comes to creating your budget: What do you need to start doing?
What are somethings that you said this month you wanted to start doing, but you haven’t started? Maybe it’s something that you want to start; maybe you want to start adding more money to your savings. Maybe you spent a lot on Christmas gifts, and you want to start building that fund back up in your savings account, or maybe you want to start investing. Maybe you want to start putting aside a certain amount of money, so you can invest more money. Whatever it is there are all things that we can start doing today that will get us closer to reaching our money goals.
The third question to ask yourself when it comes to creating your budget: What do you need to keep doing?
The third question you need to ask yourself is, what do you need to keep doing? What are you doing great? Are you packing your lunch? Are you avoiding the sales section? Because I think something that I do and sometimes we think that we’re getting a good deal is because something is on sale. Just because something is on sale doesn’t mean you actually need it. It’s good for us to analyze the things that we need to do better, but we must also celebrate our wins.
There you have it these are the 3 questions to ask yourself each month when it comes to creating your monthly budget aka your spending plan and road map that if followed you will reach your money goals this year.
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