Learning how to budget is often something we are not taught at school. However, this is something which can make a huge difference to how you live your life and how you spend your money. Knowing how to budget properly is a skill that you should develop as soon as possible if you want to keep on top of your spending in the future. Here, we are going to take you through four tips to help you budget, so keep reading if you’d like to find out more.
Track Your Spending
You might not actually realise it but the change you spend throughout the day actually adds up to quite a lot per month. In order to understand how you are spending your money properly, you should track everything that you spend for a whole week. This might seem slightly over the top but at the end of the week you can look back and find out how much that coffee every morning adds up to. Take a note of each penny and then sit down and analyse it.
Spread Out Big Purchases
When you need to buy something like a new washing machine or a car when yours breaks, it can be difficult to pay that lump sum and still allow yourself to budget. A great way to get around this is to spread out the payments monthly for things like your car. Car leasing lets you get a new car for monthly payments, meaning that you can get it sooner and you can work out how much you’ll be spending each month for the next couple of years. There’s an abundance of car leasing special offers and personal car leasing deals online if you think that this could help you.
Use More Cash
If you are used to spending a lot of money on your bank card, then you’ll probably find that it is harder to keep track of your spending. It can be easy to just swipe your card or your phone and not even realise how much you are spending on certain items and then in a few days when you check your bank account, you have a lot less money than you thought. A good way to get around this is to try and use more cash as the physical money will help you to understand how much you are actually spending each day.
Make Use of Tools
Believe it or not, there are plenty of apps that you can use to actually help yourself budget properly. These apps are great, and they can make use of your bank details to track your spending and let you know when you are running low on cash. They can also tell you what you are spending more money on and what you should maybe avoid. Make sure to only use trusted apps for this purpose, as you don’t want to give your bank details to an app that you can’t trust.