2. Separate Your Budget into Fixed, Savings, and Variable Expenses

Once you’ve created a balanced budget, the next step is to divide your budget into three categories. Learning how to separate your budget into fixed, savings and variable expenses will help you organize your bank accounts in a way that makes budgeting easy.

3. Organize Your Bank Accounts

Now that you’ve split your budget into three categories, you can organize your bank accounts. The idea is to separate the money meant for your bills, from the money meant for savings, from the money meant for spending. This way you always have enough money to pay your bills, you know your spending money is a reasonable amount, and you can save for emergencies and those budget breakers that come up only every so often.

Click here to learn how to organize your bank accounts in 3 easy steps!

4. Begin Living On Your Budget with a Paycheque Plan

A paycheque plan is where you begin taking your budget off of the paper and putting it into action. Create a timeline to make sure all of your bills get paid on time, you are able to spend your cash, and save for irregular expenses and emergencies.

Here’s how to begin living on a budget with a paycheque plan.

5. Continue Tracking Your Expenses

At the beginning of the budgeting process, and periodically throughout, it’s a really good idea to track where your money is going. This lets you know if your plan is working or not. Tracking expenses doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It’s simply a tool you should use every now and again to make sure your budget will continue to work for you and your family.

Here are the easiest ways to track your expenses.

6. Review Your Progress

When you begin to live on a budget, you will notice a change in how you feel. You will feel lighter, sleep better, and have less stress about money. Take time to recognize the difference in how you feel managing your money now compared to the way you felt when you started.

Set up meetings with yourself to check in on how your money plan has been going. Think about what has been working well, and what’s not working well right now. How can you make adjustments to make your life easier?

Reflect on some unexpected expenses that arose over the past couple of months. How did you deal with those? Is there anything you should change to deal with them in a better way in the future?

Taking time to review your progress is a valuable experience. Start with 3 minutes every week at first, and then eventually you will be able to spread out your check-ins to every quarter.

A Non-Profit Credit Counselling Agency Can Help You Live on a Budget

If you would like to talk to an expert about any of these steps, just ask! At no cost, you can sit down and speak with an accredited Credit Counsellor to create a budget, or get help putting it into action.

Learning how to live on a budget isn’t information we are born knowing. It’s something we all must learn at some point in our lives, and we hope this has helped to guide you through the process. Happy budgeting!