How do you Budget yourself to last the month?

I have three accounts. One for the house and bills etc, one for me to spend and the last for savings.

Luckily I can leave myself enough in the 'spend on crap' account to last the Month without having to check. Well unless I make a major purchase but that would come out of my savings anyway.
 
Hedge said:
My income isnt big but with being in the RAF living on Base and Eating here my Wage comes out at around 1100pm after deductions.

Bare in mind that my Accomodation and 3 meals a day have already came off that :)
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Simples then, get a second account and pay all your fixed direct debits out of that, then set up a standing order from your primary account to your second account for the required amount plus £50 or so. Then setup a savings account, setting aside £50-£100 per month. Set both of these payments to come out of your account 4 days after you get paid ( in case of bank holidays etc).

That way all of your debts will be taken out of your wages before you have a chance to spend it, and you get a little bit of money building up for **** ups and computer components.
 
Here's what I do:

Create a spreadsheet listing your income and essential outgoings, the latter being all your static charges (such as insurance/tv/phone/broadband/rent/mortgage/etc). From this work out how much you have left for your dynamic costs (fuel/food/drinking shenanigans)

Have all your direct debits coming out of your existing account. You will know how much you need in this account as the cost doesn't change.

Create a second bank account, this will be used for your dynamic costs and general spending. Ensure you have enough in your first account to pay your bills, that way you're never down on a payment. And transfer the rest into this account.

Divide what you have left into weekly amounts, this will be your allowance.

Use a third (savings) account if you wish to transfer any unused cash for the future :).
 
I follow a similar procedure to Scuzi. I have multiple bank accounts which are all fed via standing order from my main bank account. For big quarterly or annual expenses I syphon off the relevant amount each month so that (failing unforseen costs) I don't get hit with large bills in any particular month.

For example, I have a standing order for £90 pcm which goes to an account which pays for my £1100 travel card every June. I follow the same approach for my flat's service charge, holidays, car related expenses... everything really.
 
Hedge said:
Need to bring it down to a level and just pay off my debt quicker I think.

My debts are..

1250 Credit card
150 Overdraft
800 Loan off Mother.
40pm Internet
40pm Mobile.
50pm Car insurance.

Its not really much when I think about it, yet I seem to make a pigs ear of it every month :(.
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In your position I would focus on paying off the highest interest debt above all else for a while - which is probably credit card or overdraft.. If your loan off mother is interest free then obviously draw that one out longer if you don't feel bad about it :p
Then I would look at whether you really need to spend £40pm on internet / mobile phone or if a cheaper package would make no difference.

Have a look at this to work out how long your credit card debts last at different levels of repayment...
http://www.whatsthecost.com/creditCard.aspx

Also if you've got a huge interest rate on your credit card you could look at doing a balance transfer to a 0% card, as long as you stick to the payments and make sure you aren't tempted to borrow more, e.g. http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cards/?tab=1
 
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I just have all my direct debits taken out within the first week of each month.

The rest that is left, is mine to play with for the month. I don't really spend all of it as I don't go out drinking/meals etc. My only luxury is video games so unless a game is out that month then I won't really spend anything, thus it snowballs for next month, so I put a good chunk into a savings account.

edit: Just looked at your income/outgoings. Your outgoings only come to £130 a month out of £1100??? Is that correct?? If thats the case you could be debt free within a couple of months!
 
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I spend it all as quickly as possible and then I don't have to worry about having anything to make last till the end of the month :D.

but in all seriousness I write down everything I know is outgoing between that payday and the next, bills basically, then I deduct things I want to pay for (savings, driving lessons and so on), things I could do without but choose to do. after that I just spend what I want to when I want to.

I try and stay about 6 rolling months ahead and make adjustments as I need to (ie recently got promotion which threw out all my estimated finances for the next 6 months). I've always got some idea what's going in and out and I'm generally in the black
 
Simple really. Once your monthly bills have gone out, which are usually the same every month, just set yourself limits based on how much spare cash you have and/or want to spend.

Personally I set myself a limit of £150 per week max as I feel spending more than that is a bit of a waste. The remainder of my disposable income, plus any extra if I don't spend £150, goes into a savings account. If I have a major night out I add an extra £50 to that weeks limit.

For big purchases I just look a little closer as to when exactly it's best to buy it, using savings or credit card if required.
 
Pretty spectacular that you manage to run out of money when accommodation and food is paid for you! That's a pretty decent wage tbh, it's what the equivalent of 26-28k outside of the military (ie paying for your own food/rent/bills). If not more.
 
Clothing kills me, I cant buy cheap clothes and I'm a brand whore. And then ill be up the pub a few times a week with mates spending on both beer and pool, and on top of that spending at the food court as I work in a mall.

I fail at saving, or any kind of money management, I have no money, am going to Paris in two days, and when I come back I'm straight off to reading lmao.
 
Definitely seems like I've been a fool with my stuff by not budgetting. As someone says my wage probably is quite good with regards to not having rent or large food bills.

Let myself down mainly with travelling on trains, drinking on odd weekends and a weakness for eating pricey food on weekends.

Gonna set up a second account tomorrow and use one for bills plus saving and the other disposable .

I'm gonna have a word with my mam and put more money onto my credit card than I give to her .
 
boxman2000 said:
I have an excel spreadsheet listing every regular expense and net that off against income. I have spreadsheets up to the end of 2013.
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+1 on a spreadsheet. I have one on my google docs. It's a pretty simple one with columns going across by month, and the bottom cell of each column totals things up, and the top cell of each column carries over the balance from the previous month's remaining total. I just add all my expected outgoings at the start of the month, and every so often I check my online banking and update it with the transactions from there.

There's probably more efficient ways of doing it but works for me.
 
Chris1712 said:
Pretty spectacular that you manage to run out of money when accommodation and food is paid for you! That's a pretty decent wage tbh, it's what the equivalent of 26-28k outside of the military (ie paying for your own food/rent/bills). If not more.
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In this country there are many ways to blow lots of money and we're all strongly encouraged to do so, so it's commonplace for people to blow however much money they have. Having £1100 a month spare and managing to blow it all on nothing much before the end of the month is silly, but easily done.

It's nothing new. Many years ago, I knew a couple who were both students and pretty poor. They managed. They both graduated pretty well and went straight into rather good jobs. That left them with literally dozens of times as much money spare after essentials. Far more spare money than they could spend! Within a couple of months they were running out before the end of the month - they'd adapted to frittering it away.

My take-home pay is less than what many of the people here would regard as disposible amounts of money, far less than they'd consider the minimum required to live on. Yet I live quite comfortably on it. If I had twice as much disposible income, or five times as much, I'd probably adapt to it within a few months. Although now I'm older and wiser, I'd probably do it more efficiently by overpaying on my mortgage and building up some savings as a buffer against inevitable larger expenses not covered by insurance.
 
I have a spreadsheet. I plan several pay packets in advance, I make sure all the essentials such as food, rent and bills and all accounted for and then I can see exactly how much I have left over to spend on myself.

It works.
 
Hedge said:
Definitely seems like I've been a fool with my stuff by not budgetting. As someone says my wage probably is quite good with regards to not having rent or large food bills.

Let myself down mainly with travelling on trains, drinking on odd weekends and a weakness for eating pricey food on weekends.

Gonna set up a second account tomorrow and use one for bills plus saving and the other disposable .

I'm gonna have a word with my mam and put more money onto my credit card than I give to her .
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You might also find the money demotivator useful. It sounds like you've a habit of regular spending of moderate amounts, which is something easily overlooked because we all have a tendency towards considering only the present and immediate future. If you spend, say, £50 on something....well, £50 isn't that much to you so it doesn't register as a significant expenditure. But if you spend £50 on that something twice a week, it is a significant expenditure - it's ~40% of your disposible money. It's obvious when written down, but people just don't generally think that far into the future.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/protect/demotivator/

Feed it an expense, a frequency and your income and it tells you how much you spend on it per year, gives a rough estimate of how many days per year you're working solely to pay for it and a rough estimate of how much it would cost over a working lifetime. In short, it gets over the tendency to consider only the present and immediate future. It really shows the impact of repeated small expenditures. I just fed it something I think is probably quite commonplace - a person on £20K who spends £5 on breakfast on the way into work. Hardly anything - a mere 1/4000th of their pay. But it's actually £1250 a year, which is about 4.9 weeks worth of take-home pay for them. It's far from hardly anything.
 
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