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2 Things You May Have Left Out of Your Personal Budget
My name is Donovan Baldwin, and, among other things, I have been an accountant. In fact, I have spent several years in various organizations creating budgets, analyzing and amending budgets, and evaluating the performance to expectations as set out in the budget.
It was a few years ago that I first began looking at personal finance issues, As I read various books on the subject, I was not surprised to learn that one of the first steps recommended by the experts on personal finance on how to repair credit, get out of debt, or simply manage money effectively. Well, the advice made sense to me. Certainly, in my various roles as accountant, business manager, and fiscal consultant, I had been able to see first hand how budgets were made, how they worked, and how basic they were to the financial plans and decisions of any organization.
Of course, I immediately understood how this translated into personal finance decisions.
In terms of money flow at least, any person, or family, is essentially an operating business. Just like GM or Morgan Stanley (good examples, right) that fiscal entity needs to operate in the black. As with major corporations, a complete budget is an important tool in this process.
However, as I reviewed the recommendations in many articles and even some highly recommended books, I noticed two areas that seemed to be often overlooked.
1. Non-budgeted occasional expenditures
2. Periodic expenditures
NON-BUDGETED OCCASIONAL EXPENDITURES
Most of us, including many of the personal finance gurus I researched tend to overlook these common, but generally small cash outlays when creating a budget. However, don't let the size of these expenditures fool you. These small, unobtrusive cash payments can often be quite significant.
For example: I used to regularly stop at a small convenience store on the way to work and get a cup of coffee and some sort of snack at a local convenience store. On the way home, I would also often pick up a cheap, snack, burger, or taco.
These purchases, which I made almost daily, did not register on my personal cash meter, mainly because they were small, paid out of my pocket, and did not seem to hurt at the moment.
When I added them up, however, they came to over $60 a month!
For many families, an extra $60 a month could be an amount which makes the diference between buying groceries or going to the local food bank. Even if it is not that painful a cost for the individual or family, if they don't know that it specifically exists, and how big it really is, they could suddenly find themselves short of grocery money at the end of the month.
Including these incidental expenditures in your family budget not only creates an awareness of what is treated as a relatively major cash outlay, but prevents it from creating a hidden cash drain which depletes your actual availability of funds.
Another point: Simply making note of this fact can save you a lot of money once you realize how much your behavior is costing you. I figured that if I made my own coffee before leaving for work and took healthier snacks than what I got at the convenience store, I could save nearly $50 a month. I also saved nearly 10 minutes a day, and a lot of frustration, getting into and out of a busy convenience store. I also got to work a few minutes earlier so that I was able to get in a walk, which was good for my health.
By the way, even though it's not part of this article, being healthy is a great way to save a LOT of money.
While including these types of expenditures in your monthly budget can go a long way towards making it more accurate, making allowances for certain periodic expenditures can be of even more importance for most people.
PERIODIC EXPENDITURES
In my years as an accountant, as is common, I worked with annual budgets, and built them using monthly data, and provided monthly budgets as well. However, in situations like those, a large expense anticipated in one month of the year, was simply included as a matter of course. The expense was usually covered by an annual income, such as a government grant.
As you and I well know, most of us simply cannot depend on some massive amount of money showing up at the beginning of our fiscal year, or at periodic intervals. Most of us will simply get a paycheck weekly, every couple of weeks, or even once a month.
The type of monthly budget prepared by most families only deals with that sort of income and how it is going to be impacted by such monthly expenses as rent, mortgage payments, car payments, insurance, utility costs, etc. However, for many of us, there will possibly be certain fees or expenses which will show up periodically, for which they have not included in their budget.
For example: I once lived in an area which had fairly high property taxes. My annual property taxes were roughly $2,400. As a result, one month each year, I had to come up with that amount of money. My uncommitted funds which were normally available each month at that time were just about that amount. This meant that, if I did not prepare for that large periodic expenditure, I would find myself suddenly short of funds in that month.
What happens to people's judgement in these situations is quite common and well known to personal financial advisors.
When someone is suddenly hit with large expenses which they have not prepared for, they may put them off while trying to come up with the money. This can not only create personal stress, but can eventually result in higher costs as the taxing creditors generally add interest and penalties until such time as the bill is paid.
Whatever the eventual outcome, the bill will have to be paid sooner or later. The hit to the wallet is going to come...now or later...but it WILL eventually come People under this kind of financial stress, often resort to financially inefficient means of coping with the situation. For example, some will take out loans at unreasonable interest to pay one debt, creating another which will affect their monthly cash flow for some unknown length of time.
A simpler, and much more effective way, is to simply anticipate such periodic expenditures when creating a budget. Using the example outlined above, if I had known in January that I am going to have to pay $2,400 in November, I would have ten months to prepare for the outlay, I could then set up a monthly budget amount of $240 which will be taken out of my discretionary funds. This is still slightly painful perhaps, but much less painful than what might happen in November or the ensuing months. If you know a year in advance as you prepare your budget, you can actually set aside the monthly amount needed to cover expense over a full 12 months. In this case, the monthly budget set-aside would be only $200.
Obviously, any budget can only as valuable as the accuracy of the information included within it. If you are omitting items such as regular, small expenditures and generally larger periodic expenditures, you could be setting yourself up for some nasty financial surprises in the future.
About the Author
Donovan Baldwin is a 65-year-old amateur bodybuilder, freelance writer, certified optician, and Internet marketer currently living in the Atlanta, Gerogia area. A University Of West Florida alumnus (1973) with a BA in accounting, he has been a member of Mensa and has been a Program Accountant for the Florida State Department of Education, the Business Manager of a community mental health center, and a multi-county Fiscal Consultant for an educational field office. He has also been a trainer for a major international corporation, and has managed various small businesses, including his own. After retiring from the U. S. Army in 1995, with 21 years of service, he became interested in Internet marketing and developed various online businesses. He has been writing poetry, articles, and essays for over 40 years, and now frequently publishes original articles on his own websites and for use by other webmasters. He offers a line of do it yourself legal software at .http://xtramoney4me.net/do-it-yourself-legal-forms/index.html.
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