Sara's been reading personal finance blogs for a while now, and she's ready to set up a budget. She's come to us for help. She writes:

I would like to start listing my spending totals into a spreadsheet budget along with setting goals for 'bigger things' (trips, winter tires etc). Do you have a budget template that works for you, or could you please recommend a few tips on getting started?

A budget can be an excellent tool not only for planning your spending, but also for planning your saving. Over the past 2½ years, I've shared a variety of budgets and budgeting tools — here are some of my favorite. Continue reading...

This article was written by Nickel, who writes about personal finance at Five Cent Nickel. Since that and his four kids don't keep him busy enough, he's launched another site more narrowly focused on credit card offers.

Though small was your allowance, you saved a little store; and those who save a little shall get a plenty more. — William Makepeace Thackeray

Just over three years ago, we decided to start paying our kids an allowance. While the decision whether to implement an allowance is highly personal, I thought I'd pull together some thoughts on the subject for those of you with kids of your own. Continue reading...

This is the first post from Winston, the new GRS editorial assistant.

My wife and I have saved thousands of dollars by landscaping our own yard.

Four years ago, we were feeling overwhelmed by our back yard. We'd been in our home for a couple of years, had spent some time and money on the inside, and were ready to move on to backyard projects. 

One of my favorite saving techniques is the use of targeted accounts. If I want to save for something big — like a Mini Cooper, for example — I'll open a new savings account specifically for this purpose. I first learned about this method from Robert Pagliarini's The Six-Day Financial Makeover:

Traditionally, most people invested for various vague goals and lumped all of their savings together in a single investment account. That's pretty boring. It's not very inspiring or effective. Purpose-Driven Investing satisfies our need for a purpose and our need for instant gratification by thinking of each of our goals as a separate “basket”. Each of our baskets represents a single goal with a clear purpose that we can see and grow.

What does this mean in the real world? It means that we have a single investment account for every goal. For example, if one of your goals is to take the family on a European vacation, create a separate savings account called “Family European Vacation Fund”. This account or basket contains all of your savings toward that one goal. Every penny in the account is for the European vacation — not for retirement, a new car, your emergency fund, your kids' college tuition, or any other goal.

Continue reading...

More about...Banking, Budgeting

Most families need to stick to a budget when they travel. But tracking daily expenses, especially in a foreign currency, can be tricky. Here are some easy tips to make it easy to keep track of how much you're spending.

Before you leave

Create an email folder for your trip

Each time you make a booking, place the itinerary confirmation and receipt into an email folder or label. You can use the folder to help you build your final itinerary before you leave, too.

Set a daily budget

Set a daily budget that includes lodging, food, transportation, and entertainment. During the trip, you can track your spending against this goal.

My wife has always maintained a sizable savings account, but having extra cash is new to me. Until recently, I had always lived paycheck-to-paycheck, often treading close to a zero dollar balance in my checkbook for months at a time. Now, though, I've not only established an emergency account, but set up a couple of targeted accounts as well. (One is for vacations, and the other is for a new car.)

My method works for me, but others have different approaches. In her book Debt-Proof Living, author Mary Hunt suggests a sort of "emergency fund plus". Often when people struggle with money, she says, it's not the predictable monthly bills that are the problem. People cannot cope with the unexpected things — not just emergencies (like a severe illness), but irregular expenses like auto maintenance, wedding and birthday gifts, or a new pair of shoes.

To deal with all of life's surprises, Hunt recommends a Freedom Account. Here's how it works: Continue reading...

This article was written by Joshua Timberman, whose passion for personal finance started after reading Dave Ramsey's The Total Money Makeover. He became debt-free in November. He is the Financial Peace University coordinator at his church, and is an active participant at Get Rich Slowly and other personal finance blogs.

The most important thing to do with your money is to give it a plan. A budget. A spending plan. A cash-flow plan. Call it what you will, but having a plan for how you spend money will set you free to actually enjoy it.

Managing Money and Impulses

Everyone who has any kind of income needs a budget. Successful companies and governments manage their money with budgets. Even unsuccessful companies and governments do budgets (though it can be argued they don't have the right approach). To get ahead with money, you need to manage it. And that is what a budget really is: Money management, on purpose, written down.

J.D. doesn't talk a lot about budgeting at Get Rich Slowly — he uses a spending plan — but I want to share a personal budget planner I've created that has helped me immensely. I'm not historically a budget person myself, but I've been using this for a while and it seems to be working quite well. I hope that some of you find it useful, too.

This budget planning spreadsheet is available in the following formats:

• Microsoft Excel (70kb) — right-click and choose "Save as..." to download. This file should also work with Open Office.
• Google Docs — select "USE TEMPLATE" to save to your account.

Please note: This spreadsheet is designed solely to keep you on a budget you've already set, not to help you create a budget. Budgets vary from person-to-person. Create one that works for you, and use this planner to track your progress. (If you need help developing a budget, try this budget estimator from GRS reader Justin M.)

For the past few months, I've been moving toward a system of paperless personal finance. In this post from Paul Lussier, he explains his own automated system.

Lately J.D. has been talking a lot about automating his finances.  In my world (that of high-tech, software, and large computer systems), we strive to automate as much as possible. By doing this, we hope to minimize error by reducing human interaction, leveraging the power of the computer for what it's good at, leveraging the power of people for what we're good at.

In other words, we emphasize the strengths of both the computer and the human. Computers are really good at doing the tedious, mind-numbing, soul-sucking repetitive tasks which humans hate. Humans are far better at reasoning, logic, and creative thinking than computers.

Three years ago, I decided to get out of debt. I hit the books, reading one personal finance title after another, searching for answers. Two books — Your Money or Your Life and The Total Money Makeover — were perfect for my situation. They gave me the tools I needed to tackle my problems. Now I've found a third book that would have been useful at the start of my journey to financial freedom.

All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, published in 2005, was written by the mother-daughter team of Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. These women don't get bogged down in the details of frugality and investing. They're more interested in changing behavior, in fixing the big stuff. They offer a framework around which the reader can build lasting financial success.

A Balanced Budget

Though Warren and Tyagi would have you believe that their system is different from anything that's ever been published, it's not. It puts a different spin on things sometimes, but ultimately their advice is similar to that found in most other solid personal finance books. All Your Worth is about creating a budget.