Book Review: How to Make a Budget
Recently I wrote about how to create a simple household budget that will allow you to track where you are spending your money. Bryan Carr’s Kindle Edition e-book, “How to Make a Budget: Simple Budget Techniques and Tips on Saving Money” takes the realm of budgeting a notch higher. His book not only helps you see where you money goes, but it also features several money saving tips that are quite useful, as well as what to do with the money you saved following his suggested frugal spending.
His recommended budgeting strategy is to create a baseline budget using data from your recent three months statements of all your bank accounts and credit cards, including receipts of purchases. Although he added receipts of purchases includes cash, this is where I find the baseline input lacking. We usually do not get receipts for our cash purchases such as your lattes, magazines, parking fees, fast food and the likes. These could add up to a lot when we calculate how much these are costing us for three months. This flaw, however, is compensated by the free budget template that can be downloaded from his site. I always prefer digital recording of dollars and cents rather than paper and pencil that is so yesterday. [Read more...]
