I’ve written about the value of a form for your home budget several times. I’ve also written about the value that is derived from writing down your home budget. I want to bring these two principles together:

1. Your home budget form need not be complex.
2. You must write your budget down.

I do a lot of research on the internet regarding budgeting. I try and see what people are really looking for to manage their money. This helps me market my product better, and helps me get to know my audience (I’ll take a small bow for any copywriters reading this…thank you).

What I’ve noticed over the years is the constant searching for some type of form for your home budget. People are looking for something they can use to get their finances in order. And where do finances feel the pinch the most? In your home.

But something is missing: ACTION!

What makes one form better than another? Will one method somehow spring your budgeting into action, while the other will do nothing at all? Of course not.

The form is not important. It’s your use of the form that is key.

Allow me to share my personal experience with this several years ago. While I was in high school (yes, high school) I thought it would be smart (and I was curious) to track my spending. I wanted to know exactly what I was spending all of my money on. Did I look around the internet for several hours trying to find the perfect solution? No. I took action. And created this:

Download this form

If you’ve taken the moment necessary to download the .pdf of this, you might be laughing. To quote Han Solo in Star Wars, “Laugh it up.” Because this form cut my expenses in half baby! Now I’m laughing all the way to the bank (I won’t mention the fact that I was working for $5.50 an hour at the time - they were small deposits at said bank).

Let’s go through the bitter simplicity of this home budget form. I stuck it in a binder for starters. The binder sat inside my desk drawer. At night, when I was getting ready for bed I would think to myself, “Did I spend any money today?” This usually involved digging around in my pockets for any receipts. If the answer was affirmative I would pull out the binder, open it up, and record something like this:

If the answer was negative, I would go brush my teeth.

My point of all this is to illustrate that you do not need some fancy-dancy form to get your budget under way! A piece of paper and a pencil will suffice. Heck, I didn’t even put the numbers in a spreadsheet. When the paper was filled, I would manually total it up, print out a fresh copy, and put it on top in the binder.

Now, I mentioned writing down your budget. This form does not actually allow you to do that. What it does do is put a major emphasis on your spending. My spending went from $440 every six weeks, to $215 every eight weeks. And the beauty of it all? I didn’t even feel I was depriving myself of anything. Why? Because the things I cut out were not giving me real value anyway. They were impulses.

Keep that in mind. The most powerful tip I can give you on how to manage your money is to write it down.

Now, we’ve all gotten a bit more sophisticated since I was in high school. And everyone’s a bit (lot) more in debt too. The same rules still apply. Use something simple that will get you in the habit of writing down your purchases, saving your money, and getting out of the paycheck to paycheck trap.

Regardless of what you use, begin writing down every penny you spend today!

TAKE ACTION!

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