Money Hacks

Sally’s Kitchen has tips on How to Budget Effectively, including an Excel spreadsheet template for download. There are some great ideas and suggestions here, simple things like: print out a small copy of your budget and tape it over your credit card so that every time you’re tempted to use it, you’re reminded of your goals; always shop with a list in order to avoid temptation; when shopping on-line, add items to your wish list rather than your cart, and then check back in a week or a month (when it will be clearer if what you wanted was just an impulse purchase).

“Track everything you spend” is one of the key steps to getting rich slowly. It’s easy to do this after the fact using a personal ledger or software such as Quicken. But how do you plan for expenses?

A budget is the best way to see where your money needs to go. Some people keep detailed budgets, and adhere to them religiously. Others — such as myself — keep loose budgets, and use them simply as guidelines. Whichever kind of budgeter you are, PearBudget is an excellent tool to help the process.

PearBudget is a FREE budgeting program, written in Excel. It can be used by almost any spreadsheet program (Excel, Word, OpenOffice, etc.). Setup is a snap, and it takes less than half an hour a month to maintain it and see how you’re doing. (And—did we mention?—it’s free!)

The brains behind PearBudget are currently developing a web-based version of the software. If you’ve been wanting to start a budget, or have been looking for ways to simplify your existing budget process, give PearBudget a try.