Archive for category Personal Finance

Money Saving Recommendations For A Family Budget – Two Main Principles

Posted by Loans Guru in Personal Finance on June 3rd, 2011

First and foremost, I would like to mention that growing a savings account is one of the simplest building blocks of financial planning, for the reason that a savings account is a vital part of a family budget. In this article we are going to focus on the key principles of saving money for a family, which are:

(a) earning more money,
(b) spending less money.

(a) Earning More Money
It should be started by saying that there are many ways to enlarge your income. One of the possible variants is taking a second job. In actual fact, even the kids can chip in to add to their future. If you put all income your family receives into your savings account, you will be able to accelerate your savings.

It goes without saying that currently the job market is pretty tight, but this is not the reason for you to give up. You may take into consideration starting your own home-based business and start making money online.

One more method to make some additional cash you need to be aware of is selling off some of the unwanted stuff around the house. So, you may organize a yard sale or sell unnecessary items on the internet on special web sites.

(b) Spending Less Money
This should become a habit for your family. The primary step for you to make is keeping a notebook filled with each cent your family spends. To go into more details there is a need to point out that studying your expenditures will assist you to see things that you can do without (for example, gourmet morning coffee, bottled water and buying lunch instead of bringing your own lunch and drink).

You should also remember that one more method to decrease your expenses is using coupons, in particular on groceries. It should be added that by adding up the total coupon values and putting that money in your savings account you can notably increase your family savings.

In conclusion, there is a need to mention that you should try to always take at least 5% of your salary and put it away for a rainy day. At first this might seem a bit tough but, in some time this will become a good habit as well and this will have an extremely positive impact on your savings.

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Personal Review For YNAB Expenses Software

Posted by Loans Guru in Personal Finance on May 31st, 2011

There are many home expenses software applications out there, although many of them lack simplicity and have unnecessary attributes for the normal user. Even free budget spreadsheets that can be downloaded off the Internet seem to have this over engineered quality. If you have to spend a lot of time working on a budget, it’s likely that you’ll lose interest and won’t see it through.

In doing some exploration on budgeting, I ran across this saying…” live on last month’s salary”. The statement is associated with a budget software program known as YNAB (why nab), a home expenses software program. Having a month’s income sitting in the bank always sounded like a beneficial objective to have, so I downloaded this system to test it out.

The idea is to change the way you think about your income. On the whole, many of us live on only our paychecks without savings and wages are allotted for immediate expenditures, while credit cards are used to pay for the rest. In YNAB, as income becomes available there is an option utilizing it during the current month or to be allocated the following month. It’s also possible to split the income – some can be used now and the rest later. Interesting!

Over time, as you track expenditures and conserve, you will be allocating nearly all of your current month’s salary to the next month. This means, you are living on last month’s wages with additional cash in the bank always. This transformation will take awhile of course, determined by your state of affairs and the level of debt you have.

Additionally, you should have sufficient funds to cover once in awhile costs like annual insurance payments or auto renewals because they will be planned for in advance. This is important to retain decent financial practices and not get into further debt.

The name YNAB stands for You Need a Budget which pretty much says it all. It is straightforward home expenses software taking only a short time each day to maintain once the initial setup is done. Because of the forward-thinking nature of the application, there should be less anxiety about getting your bills paid. This is particularly useful if you are on a debt reduction plan.

YNAB’s website has plenty of help for users such as online classes, forums and a ton of instructions that will help you in creating that switch in thinking from money panic to money secure. The initial step is to download the software for a free 7-day trial to check it out.

The one problem with the program is the absence of a debt snowball tracker for debt reduction. You can certainly track your debts with YNAB, but it really would be good to have the long-term snowball calculator. Perhaps it will be a part of a future version.

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