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Budgeting

How To Survive Financially After Losing Your Job

Losing a job can be devastating, but it’s an experience that just about everyone has to go through at some point. Perhaps you were fired for a critical mistake, maybe you were replaced by another ambitious professional, or it’s possible that you’ve simply been laid off as a result of company-wide downsizing. There are a million and one reasons why you may have lost your job, but that’s not important now. The past is over and done, and you need to focus on making progress in the future. Financial survival after job loss should be your first immediate concern.

Begin by taking stock of your finances so that you can figure out where you stand in the world. Calculating your income should be relatively simple at this point. If you have any future pay coming to you, in uncollected checks or severance pay, include those figures in your calculations. Figure out how much money you have in your savings, credit, and assets, and then start looking over your expenses. Prioritize your bill payments and spending to put the most essential expenses first. You may have to make some sacrifices in the near future, but cutting frivolous expenses out of your budget can help greatly in relieving your present financial strain.

March 18, 2013

Budgeting

Top Tips For How To Maintain Control Over Your Personal Finance

In this tough and uncertain economic climate the average person’s job security is worryingly unstable. Combine this with an ever increasing cost of living that doesn’t truly reflect inflation rates and most of us are having more than one sleepless night worrying about the state of our personal financial affairs. However there are many steps that we can all take to ensure that we remain in personal control over our own finances. This article explores some of the best techniques to accomplish this:

Erase all your existing debt at once if at all possible.

Of course this is not always a possibility. However if you are one of the many people who happily live through their credit card overdraft you should balance that account immediately. Indeed it would be wise to deposit extra funds into any credit card account so you can still make emergency purchases with the card without putting the account into overdraft. This is important because it removes the risk of forgetting or not being able to pay off your outstanding balance at the end of each month, so should you lose your source of income you do not have to be concerned with the late payment penalty fees and the interest on your debt that will continue to gain momentum the longer it is unchecked.

January 31, 2013

Budgeting

An Easy Way To Budget For Groceries

My husband and I like to eat, and I would say that we are both fairly big eaters. We eat a lot of fresh produce and keep our fridge stocked full of a wide variety of veggies and fruits.

That being said, sometimes I find it difficult to keep our grocery spending in control. In order to control our spending, we came up with a plan. Here goes:

We decided to limit our spending to $400 per month for groceries. Each month I keep track of every grocery purchase I make. At the end of the month, I total the amount and see how we did. By keeping track of our grocery spending throughout the month, it has been easier for me to know where we’re at. It eliminated any guessing.

November 14, 2012

Budgeting

Little Treats Cost More Than You Think

If you suggest to someone that a little treat they’re planning is a waste of money, you run the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon. After all, the people thinking about treating themselves will tell you that it’s relative pennies and well affordable.

They may well be right, but it’s far more probable that they aren’t. That’s because they set the amount off against their monthly total, seeing it in isolation of everything else so, yes, the cost seems miniscule.

October 18, 2012

Budgeting

Charting A New Course To Financial Security

Let a simple graphic help you get the financial picture

If you’re on a fixed income, you understand the challenge of finding extra savings to build a nest egg for retirement, major expenses or simply to leave something behind for your family. Aside from the difficult — and in some cases, impossible — task of finding a way to supplement that income, the most important first step is getting a handle on where all the money goes.

A pie chart does the trick. And you don’t need to know how to use a computer to create one.

If you’re unfamiliar with a pie chart, the idea is simple. Gather your spending data; break it into categories like food, utilities and gas; and convert the information into a circular graphic that displays each category as a color-coded percentage of the whole “pie” (which represents 100 percent of your spending).

You can do this by hand, of course, but who has the time? If you’re handy with Microsoft Excel or a free online service like Google Spreadsheets, you can create one in minutes. A few Web sites, such as Chartpart.com or Yellowpipe, make it even easier. Just plug some number and categories into a form and you’ll get a custom pie chart that can even be embedded in a blog or personal Web site.

Once your information is displayed graphically, you may be surprised by the results. It’s one thing to watch Game of Thrones on HBO and feel like you’re getting something of value; it’s entirely another to see that those 100 channels and premium offerings are sucking up five percent of your annual income. Better to ditch the cable, get a digital antenna, subscribe to an online DVD service like Netflix and stash the savings in a “rainy day” or retirement account.

Is your Starbucks habit having unintended consequences? Does your pricey subscription to People mean the difference between living small and saving big?

Such small, incremental changes to wasteful are much easier to identify with some organization. And those modifications are critical to ramping up your savings for the things in that really matter, like a more comfortable retirement or a safe landing when life spins out of control.

It’s as easy as, well, pie.

August 6, 2012

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