Do you have trouble budgeting? For most the answer is yes. Budgeting doesn’t have to cause headaches. Budgeting can be easy using YNAB. YNAB is software used to create and follow a budget. YNAB makes it easy to set limits for budgeting categories and track how you are doing. The goal is to stop living paycheck to paycheck. This is accomplished by creating a one month buffer. The one month buffer is equivalent to how much you make in one month. The buffer is used to budget for the current month. For example if the current month were June, you would be budgeting and spending money you made in May. Don’t worry if you don’t have enough money saved up for your buffer. YNAB will show you how to create it. After you have your buffer created you will no longer be surprised when unexpected expenses such as car trouble or medical expenses arise.
Take each of the line items in the budget and zero it out. Highlight the items that have a one-to-one correspondence with the mission or the students. A textbook has a direct connection. Mowing the grass lacks a direct connection. Mowing the grass does promote a positive atmosphere, which encourages enrollment and donations, which puts students in the chairs, which makes the textbooks necessary. While cutting the grass is necessary it is very indirect. Now fill in mission or student related line items with the values that express what you feel is appropriate (without regard for the available funds or what the board might agree to). Next, fill in the other items so that they support the mission and student decisions. This will create a deficit. The final step is to talk with the fundraising committee or development office about the deficit and request a plan for overcoming the deficit. That process produces a budget that is driven by mission and the students.
All they have to do is to populate the formula in the first row to the remaining rows in the template and the headers & sub-headers are re-aligned to the new layout. 3:Budget users no longer have to keep separate worksheets for their own workings and for submission. JUST by using formulas and not cell links, the details in the template can be easily transferred to another worksheet. Updates to the numbers usually take less than one minute. 4:Budget managers and users can make use of the database to create pivot tables and perform analysis on their budgeted numbers. With pivot tables, budget managers and users can analyse the numbers from more than one perspective (e.g. by distribution channels followed by product groups or vice versa). We can consolidate the numbers provided by each budget users (e.g. business units, departments, countries) into a worksheet using a relative unknown function which existed even in older versions of Excel such as Office 2000. It is not a macro and yet it has the power to automatically update the budget numbers when the consolidated workbook is opened (Note: Only one worksheet is needed to perform the consolidation).
So how can you enjoy life a little more on your current salary? Here a few ideas: 1. When grocery shopping, buy only the items that you planned for, and never go when you are starving. 2. Do you REALLY have to have that outfit just because it is on sale? You can curb credit card expenses by buying only when you have planned it or it is necessary. 3. Always compare prices before you make a purchase, especially a major purchase. Sometimes you can save hundreds this way. 4. Try taking your lunch to work rather than eating out. You will probably find that you will save tons this way, and your waistline will thank you. Surely you can think of other little things that are sucking you dry and killing the joy in your life. By exercising just a little restraint, you will have the money you need when you want to go on that vacation or buy that something that you have really been looking forward to. When you start to think of the whole budgeting process as an exercise in reclaiming the happiness in your life, then you will see that it is not such a bad thing.