Personal budgeting

The term ‘budgeting’ might sound boring or might even scare most of us. But it is something we need to do at some point in our lives so that we can extract the maximum value out of our income. 

Why budget?

Budgeting is the most important way you could understand and take control of your finances. Having a personal budget would help you to spend on the most important things and assist in planning for a solid financial future. It can also assist those who want to repay all their debts, reach break-even and want to stay out of financial meltdowns.  Budgeting can be very rewarding because we get to spend on things we love without feeling guilty. For example, you have money allocated on your budget for cloth shopping and entertainment that needs to be spent. 

What does budgeting involve?

Budgeting involves listing down all your incomes, expenses, setting limits, analyzing results, checking for variances and making improvements along the way to make sure that expenses are not greater than income. It might sound like a daunting and challenging task, and for most of us it is. But the challenge is not in preparing the budget; it is in in sticking to the budget once it is prepared. Successful budgeting requires experience, will power and loads of discipline. You need to learn to be accountable for each RF spent. 

Successful budgeting involves the following steps;

Define the goal of your budget: different people budget for different reasons. It might be to save some money, to repay debt, to have a secure financial future, to find out where all your money is going or to simply stop wasteful spending. A successful budget is one which enables you to meet your budget goal at the end of the budgeting period.

Set the effective date for your budget: You can set the effective date for your budget after discussing it with the people in your life who might be affected by it. This might include your dependents and your life partner. Discussing the budget with them would help you to come up with a solid budget and also getting the commitment from your family would help you to follow the budget closely. You can either prepare a quarterly budget, half yearly budget or a yearly budget; whichever suits your needs best.

Track down your expenses and list down your income: For at least a month, track down all you’re spending. A month’s worth of expenditures written down on a piece of paper would be very helpful in creating your personal budget. 

After one month of tracking down your expenses, you are ready to create your budget. Or you might create a draft budget, review and make improvements on it for one month and then at the end of the month prepare the actual solid budget. 

Determine budget categories: this would include specific categories of spending such as entertainment, groceries, travel expenses, child care, medical, etc. these budget categories are going to be included in your budget. 

Assign expenses to these specific budget categories: for instance, buying milk and bread would go under groceries expenses and buying a movie would go under entertainment. 

Distinguish variable and fixed expenses: Fixed expenses would include such items such as rent and mortgages. These are expenses that stay constant each month and does not change with the level of activity. Fixed expenses would remain the same throughout the budget period. On the other hand, variable expenses include those expenses which change with the level of activity. Most of the day to day expenses would come under variable expenses. 

Fill out the personal budget template: click here to get access to 15 free personal budget spread sheets. Most of these templates are very user friendly and can be used by almost anybody. Look around for the one that best suit your needs. Enter your expenses and incomes in to the required fields, and the worksheets would do the rest of the work for you. 

Take your time preparing the budget and be honest with yourself. Try not to underestimate the expenses and overestimate the income. Make sure you list all the expense despite how small it is, and if you don’t see a specific budget category for the expenses, put it under miscellaneous or ‘other’ expenses. 

Review the budget and make appropriate changes. After finishing the budget, ask yourself how realistic it is. You might be tempted to stretch your budget and end up with a big saving. But an unrealistic budget can be very demotivating. Make sure you understand the difference between discretionary expenses and non-discretionary expenses. Discretionary expenses are those expenses that you can reduce, increase or forgo. For example, this might include entertainment expenses or the eating out expenses. If you want to save more, you can forgo or reduce these kinds of expenses. On the other hand, non-discretionary expenses such as utilities, basic grocery items and school fees cannot be easily foregone or reduced, so you would want to make sure that you have at least enough money to cover these items. 

Stick to the budget: Following a budget involves lot of discipline and willpower. Whatever happens don’t give up on the budget. It takes time to excel at budgeting and trial and error is expected. 

Continuous improvement in your budget: After each month, you should analyze your results and make improvements. If you did not meet your budget targets, ask yourself what went wrong. Were you too strict in budgeting or were you too lax in spending? 

For example if you planned to save RF 1,000 and end up with RF 500 instead, you should try to find out the reason for this variance. It might be because you missed out some of the expenditures. Try to correct the problem in the next month’s budget.  Remember that there are only two ways that you can improve your budget. It is either through reducing expenses or increasing your income. Increasing income is harder than reducing the expenses. 

Finally, you should remember to set some money aside for a rainy day. From the money you save from budgeting, set aside 1-2 months’ worth of expenditure as emergency funds. In case something happens to you and you are unable to earn any income, this emergency fund will come to your rescue and enable you to continue with day to day expenses without having to reduce your quality of life.

10 ways to lose weight and keep it off for good

First of all remember that you are AWESOME regardless of how much you weight.

But if you have set yourself a goal of losing some weight it would make you feel SUPER AWESOME knowing that you have achieved your weight goal.

AND

Don’t lose weight to please anybody. If in the process of pleasing yourself you please someone else, that’s great! You have killed two birds with one stone.

From my personal experience I have to say losing weight and keeping it off has a lot to do with how you think and perceive yourself rather than how much work you do. Here is a list of things that works wonders for me;

1.   Set a personal ideal weight. How much do you want to weight?  This would depend on how you want to look and feel and your BMI. There are tons of BMI calculators on the internet and it takes only a few seconds to calculate.  Remember, a bit of excess weight can look good on you; you don’t need to be super slim to look beautiful. Only YOU can decide your ideal weight, depending on what makes you comfortable and the amount of weight that makes you feel healthy. Don’t let other’s perception of beauty affect your judgment.  

2.   Take food at face value. I know this sounds a bit funny, but if you are trying to lose weight you have to keep your distance with food. Some people are too emotionally dependent on food to say no to it. They eat for comfort, to fill in time, to conquer boredom and due to a host of other reasons. This can be very bad for your health, both mentally and physically. Try eating only when you’re hungry and NOT for any other reason.

Before eating anything ask yourself whether you are really hungry, how the food you are eating is contributing to your daily nutrition needs and how much you really need. Over eating at mealtime is the worst thing you can do.

3.   Take small frequent meals instead of 3 large ones. This is something that I have read about a year ago and it actually seems to work. For example if you are eating a fried rice for lunch, split it up into two; eat one half during lunch, and the other half around 5:00. That way during dinner time, you are not that hungry and you end up eating less.

4.      Plating up: Get creative and plate up your food before eating.  Don’t sit at the table with bowls full of food which will end up pursuing you to refill your plate. Put in your plate the absolute amount you want to consume, not less, not more. Some other tip related to this is using a small plate for eating, but personally I prefer larger plates, and the notion of tricking my brain into thinking that there are more food in my plate never seems to work for me.

5.      Eat with style. Every one of us gets ourselves in situations in which we want to gobble up the food as fast as we can. I know there are times when I eat like a baby dinosaurs :) We are either very hungry or just are in dire need to fill up our stomach. Try to relax before mealtime, look at your plate and take in the textures, the smell and the look of the food. Try to stick to good manners, like using a fork and knife while eating, and not talking with your mouth full, this will also give you something to think while eating. Make eating an art rather than just an act to fill up your tummy.

6.      Drink a glass of water before eating. I know this would be a piece of information that everyone of us would have come across one time or another. Drinking a glass of water before a meal fills up our tummy, reducing the need to overeat.

7.      Understand your body. If you would only listen to your body, it will tell you how much you need to eat. Talk to your body, try to understand the signs, and learn its limits. Once you reach your ideal weight, the challenge is to keep it from going up. We would always know when we gain an extra kg or lose a kg, if we remain alert. Shedding an extra kg is not a big task; all you need to do is say no to that extra piece of chocolate cake.

8.      Do some sort of exercise: Exercising not only is good for your body, it can also work wonders on your outlook on life. It gives us that extra boost of energy and a sense of accomplishment. You don’t have to do heavy exercise to tone up your body; just a half hour walk each day would do the trick.

9.      Reward yourself and love your body: This is the point in which losing weight becomes fun! Indulge yourself and your new body with stylish chic clothes. Don’t forget to throw in a new haircut and some new shoes. That would make u feel good and make u want to woe never to let yourself loose again; in the food department. Also remember to reward yourself with a yummy treat every now and then; a piece of French cream cheese cake does the trick for me.

10.  Get rid of all the ‘large’ cloths in your wardrobe: We tend to keep the large cloths in our wardrobe thinking that one day they might come in handy. Don’t plan to gain weight! Give them to charity or take them to the tailor to be adjusted, so they fit your awesome new figure perfectly.

P.S. I am not a dietician, nutritionist or a psychologist, I am just writing from my own experience. Hope you found the read enjoyable. If you have anything to say, just drop a line in the comment box.  Until next time, take care.

Unleashing your true genius – 101: Let’s rock our boats

I don’t consider myself to be an expert in the field of psychology or spirituality. However, what I strongly believe is that our inner self has much more to do with our happiness, success and prosperity as our external self. How you think is reflected in how you act and your action in turn determines how you get treated by those around you.

There is a saying, ‘we are our biggest enemies’ and what I like to say is ‘we can be our closest friends’ too.

People might be mean to you either out of jealousy, self-pity or plainly just because they are having a bad day. Don’t let someone else’s bad day ruin your good day.

When we stop believing in ourselves, opportunity and success stops knocking at our door. Bring out the best in you, in whatever field you are in. If you are a housewife, be the best housewife in the world, if you are a secretary, be the best secretary in the world and if you are an accountant or an economist, be the best in the field. Ask yourself why not instead of telling yourself you can’t. People will criticize you, try to bring you down, tell you that you can’t do it, but criticism only comes to those people who interest the critics. So you must be doing something critic worthy. Try to take in the good criticism and ignore the baseless ones. Baseless criticism comes from those people who harbor jealousy against you. Remember that ‘Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to the genius’.

Every one of us has inside our self a genius that needs to be unleashed. Unleash that genius inside you by empowering yourself. Open your eyes to the world, be alert, network, dream big, be kind, be ethical, love your family and most of all have faith in yourself. No one is going to love you unless you learn to love yourself. No one is going to show you the respect you deserve, unless you set the standard of how you want to be treated by respecting yourself.

Remember that success should never be counted in monetary terms; it should be determined by how much of a difference you made in the lives of others and how well you lived your life. We get to live only once, so why not do things that we love to do and help those in need.

There is this interesting quote I saw somewhere which says, ‘the best thing about being mortal instead of being immortal is that we get to enjoy a moment only once’. For example NOW and ONLY NOW am I getting the pleasure of writing on this topic, NOW and ONLY NOW would you be reading this post for the first time, NOW and ONLY NOW would someone somewhere gets her heart filled with happiness when she meets the man of her dreams. We can’t replicate any of these moments or our exact feelings for that a second time around. So our whole life is full of firsts, no two days are exactly the same.

Kids still have that sense of wonder as they go through each day, but as we grow up we tend to grow wary of the world and go through life like a robot. We tend to stop challenging ourselves, kids have that sense of wonder because they always get challenged, they have to learn to speak, learn to behave in social surroundings, learn to walk, and learn lot of things. Where is our sense of adventure? Why have we stopped learning? Why have we stopped challenging ourselves?

I don’t have the answer to these questions, but this is a great way to get out of your comfort zone and think outside the box. Remember the box is nothing more than a make belief set of values passed on to you by the society that you live in. In reality there is no box: interesting though huh?