Do you know where you money goes on a weekly or monthly basis? Are you in debt and want to get out? If you answered no to the first question and yes to the second there are some steps you can take to get control of your finances and start saving for vacations, a child’s education, or your retirement. Only you can do this and only you will know what and how much you need to save in order to achieve your goals. Let’s face it most of us are not that aware of our finances and in order to get ahead in today’s busy society you need to take control and be aware of your financial matters. At the end of this blog will be a link to some tools that I developed to help myself and now you get on top of your budget and debts. Below are some key points of my tools and how they work.
This is a user friendly Excel based spreadsheet that will allow you the user to customize the 9 fields designed for tracking your debts in over 90 total lines of expenses. The spreadsheet also has two income fields one having two lines for salaries if you are a working family and the other five lines for miscellaneous incomes you may receive throughout the year. The spreadsheet will allow you to budget your monthly expenses and compare that to your monthly income to see if you are able to save any excess funds. In the event you are running in the red it will allow you to see where you may cut or reduce expenses to get you back in the black. It will even display your data in a graph for easy to read snapshots and allow you to compare month to month data.
This is also an Excel based spreadsheet that will let you customize it with up to twenty different debts. These can be credit cards, consumer loans, a mortgage, or student loans. All you need to do is input the amount you owe, the minimum payment due each month, the interest rate the debt charges, and any extra money you can apply towards your debts which you can get from the budget spreadsheet detailed in the above paragraph. After you have input the data, the spreadsheet will tell you how long it will be before you are debt free, and how much you will have paid in interest payments. This is a great first step in helping you get out of debt and it will let you know what it will cost you.
No one can make you get on top of your finances but these two tools make it easy for you to do it yourself. Yes it takes a little time to keep up with things but in the end it will be worth it as you achieve financial freedom. The first thing you need to do is to figure out where your hard earned money goes each month. The second is if you are in debt how do you get out and how much will it cost you. Then once you know where your money goes and you are out of debt you can turn your attention to funding the goals you and your family may have. For the budget spreadsheet please go to budget and for the debt spreadsheet please go to debt. If you want both spreadsheet you can purchase both from either link. At $5 each that is a small price to pay for what will end up being financial freedom for you and your family.