Create your Personal Budget

    Personal Budgeting is one of the ways to improve on proper spending. We are most times focused on how we make money but never how we spend it, but budgeting is a good habit that will help us check our spending and ensure our income goes to proper use.

This are some basic-easy to apply ways to create a budget.

Step 1: Know your Monthly Spending


You can do this by either

• 
Checking through your email and calculate the monthly account statement the your bank sends.

• If you have your bank mobile App, Just request for your Statement from January 1st till now (This is the easiest).

• You can go to your bank also and fill a form requesting for it.



Now this does not include physical cash you receive that never made it to your bank account, you can pen down as much as you can remember on a separate sheet. 

Step 2: Write down your Spendings into Categories.

    Categorising your budget will help you to know how your money is spent and what it is spent on, this can help you know what is a necessity and what isn’t.

    You can categorise them into your Regular or Fixed expenses like Food, Rent, Transport or Casual expenses like clothes, outings and then also emergency spending like health, repairs and the likes.

Step 3: Set Financial Goals for Yourself

This is totally personal to you. 

    What are the things you are planning to achieve but needs some heavy financial commitment. Lately for me, it was my school fees. So it could be that of your children, to building a house or buying a car, it could also be saving towards your wedding. Both short and long term goals should be set.

Step 4: Create a plan for the next month to achieve your financial goals.

    Now with all this definitions on paper, you can predict how your next month will look like financially. So you can create a plan you could work with on the things you would spend money on to achieve your set goals. Break some of the large financial goals into bits, in percentages and over a period of time.

Step 5: Lower Unnecessary spending as much as you can

    After all you have done, sticking to your plan is totally up to you. You might have to cut down on some luxury and if you must, create it inside your budget.

Step 6: Check your Budget weekly.

    Looking at what you wrote will help remind you of what you want to achieve and keep you committed to it.