Last week I covered how I record expenses, yet I neglected to mention that I have recently starting using a great website called Mint to track expenses and to help me budget. Mint automatically updates with my online banking information and provides a great visual representation of where my money is going. The way that they keep this service free is by “suggesting” credit cards and savings accounts that would save me money. To be honest many times I have considered changing my credit card because although I carry no balance from month to month I make almost all my expenditures through my credit card, and I have very poor credit card reward program.

Mint also compares how my “At the Pump” and “Savings % rate” is compared to the national average. (below on spending and a little bit above the savings rates. One of these days I am going to switch to a Online Bank and pull in a better %, More on this later.

It seams like a respectable first real post, the importance of Budget. Budgeting is a very important process that everyone must do. The dangers you can run into by not budgeting are overdraft charges, late fees, no savings, and an all in all a smaller bank balance, not to mention the dreaded paycheck to paycheck financial health disease. If you have a Budget (that of course you stick too) you find yourself not buying the candy in the check-out line. You find yourself looking more closely at price per ounce of items at the store instead of just assuming bulk is the better deal.

Creating a Budget truly is easy mode too. A simple Microsoft excel document (or open office if your man enough to use it) and about five minutes a day, or if you prefer you can do it the old fashion way with a notebook ledger. The technique that I use is to then list all of the expenditures that I have to pay (rent, gas, electricity, food), for the variable costs I look at last month and one year ago cost to get an estimate of what I will pay, Then I add a fixed %(usually around 5-10) to the budgeted price. The reason I add this 5-10% to the estimated price is because it is a lot better to be under budget then over. At the end of the month I look at what I actually spent compared to budgeted. Left over money gets sent to a savings account. I am sure that if i didn’t budget I would not have as much money left over at the end of the month.

Thanks for coming to my new personal finance blog. My name is Craig and I am going to use this site to give you a piece of my mind. This piece of my mind will be full of finance tips tricks and hacks, news, personal finance advice, budgeting, getting and staying out of debt and all in all living a frugal but successful life. Feel free to read more about me.