Create A Family Budget Worksheet To Find A ... - Debt Consolidation

Benefits of Family Budgeting

No matter how big or small your household is, creating a family budget worksheet is an important step in keeping your collective finances under control. There are many different worksheet templates available for free on the Internet or in popular finance magazines like Kiplingers and Smart Money. Most of these are designed to track your entire family?s income and expenditures over the course of a month.

To create a family budget worksheet, determine how much you and your spouse make in a given month. It?s up to you whether you then combine these amounts or keep them separate. Many spouses prefer to keep two separate budgets, especially if both work full-time and take on different but roughly equal financial responsibilities in the household. If that?s the case, you?ll need to make two parallel budget worksheets, one for each partner.

Know Your Monthly Expenses

In either case, the next step is to divide your household?s spending into major spending categories like housing, food, transportation, and debt payments. You?ll then further subdivide these categories; transportation, for example, can be broken up into car payments, tax and registration fees, maintenance, fuel, and more. The idea is to itemize every single dollar you spend on your family so that you?ll be able to more easily identify superfluous spending.

Once you?ve created a family budget worksheet outline, begin estimating a budget for each subcategory based on your income and other factors. If you live fairly close to where you work and thus drive your fuel-efficient sedan no more than 1,500 miles per month, you might decide to budget no more than $200 per month on fuel costs and $40 more on vehicle maintenance.

Make A Family Budget You Can Live With

These budget targets should be realistic and achievable, not pie-in-the-sky dreams of frugality. Part of being financially responsible is knowing when to make investments in your family?s future; it?s just as irresponsible to withhold the money for a necessary new purchase, for example a used vehicle in good condition to replace a broken-down old car, as it is to continue shopping for new outfits as you approach your credit card?s limit.

With budget targets in hand, you must now begin keeping track of every dime you spend in each category. Creating a family budget worksheet requires disciple and the ability to follow through. Tabulate your actual spending in a second column alongside your budget for each category, noting the difference in a third column. Total this difference each month across your entire household budget.

What To Do When Your Expenses Exceed Your Income

Having a negative spread is not necessarily the end of the world. In the long run, spending more than you take in is unsustainable, especially if Visa and MasterCard and home loan debt is a major part of your household budget. If you?re spending more than you make, it?s almost certainly because your high credit card balances are stifling your ability to save money from each paycheck. Determine which categories, like dining out or clothing purchases, can be cut back and begin reducing your expenditures to a level commensurate with your household income.

Once your finances have been stabilized with the help of a family budget worksheet, it?s time to begin paying down your outstanding balances with the services of a debt consolidation agency. If you?re barely making the minimum payment on your credit card balances?or, worse, occasionally missing these payments?you may be tempted to take out a debt consolidation loan at a slightly lower rate of interest than the penalty APR you?ve no doubt been paying on your past-due credit card debts.

In the long run, however, a debt consolidation loan doesn?t make sense. If your credit card balances total $20,000 at an average annual interest rate of 25 percent, or $5,000 total annual interest, you?ll have to pay more than $420 a month in interest charges alone. You?ll need a very high credit score (740+) to get a large enough debt consolidation loan to pay off $20,000 in debt. Debt reduction instead of interest rate reduction is a better alternative.

You?ll find the greatest success with debt consolidation professionals who negotiate actual reductions in the Bank of America, Chase Bank, Capital One, Citibank or whatever credit cards, in some cases of 50 percent or greater, of your outstanding balances. For financial reasons alone, settlement offers a tremendous advantage over a debt consolidation loan: A 50 percent reduction of a $10,000 balance to $5,000 will save you $5,000 and you don?t have to worry about a denied loan application.

Getting your balance down to a more manageable level also makes it easier to see the light at the end of the tunnel and pay off your debts in larger, more meaningful installments each month. Call today or fill out the free form to discover the benefits of debt consolidation through settlement and get back on the road to financial freedom. After you become debt free, your family budget worksheet will not be as stressful to fill out.

Tagged as: debt consolidation loan, expenses and income, Family Budget Worksheet, get out of debt

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