A Simple Way to Save Your Household Budget
by Mashum Mollah Finance 03 October 2016
Forget spiders, heights, and ghosts — the thing that makes you sweat is your bank account. And unlike spectral visitors and our eight-legged friends, you can’t dig your head in the sand and ignore it. Averting your eyes from your account balance every time you take out money or charge your card is akin to financial suicide. Eventually, your ill-informed spending habits will catch up with you — maybe it already has. In which case, it’s time to sit down and commit to the scariest thing of them all: a household monthly budget.
Creating a budget is tedious. In order to make a reliable one, you’ll have to go through your finances and tally each dollar that comes in and out of your account. But it’s not just a boring afternoon spent crunching numbers. It can also be a frightening wake-up call. You can’t ignore the writing on the wall (or, in this case, the Excel spreadsheet). The red in your ledger suggests it’s time to change your spending habits.
Financial experts recommend tabling your budget so that that majority, but not all, of your income goes towards necessary monthly expenses. Depending on which advisor you speak with this, the exact percentage of your income differs, but many recommend 60% goes towards rent, groceries, and recurring bills like your utilities, insurance payments, and cell phone bill. The remaining chunk of your income is then divided equally between 4 categories: debt relief, short-term savings, retirement funds, and pocket money.
This budgeting rule works well when 60% of your income is substantial enough to cover your monthly expenses. Its feasibility starts to fall apart when the sum of your rent and utilities exceed this percentage. If the cost of living eats up most of your paycheck your ability to set aside funds for pocket money, savings, and debt repayment is severely hampered. There’s only so much money to go around. An extra hour spent playing with your budget won’t magically reveal a new source of income.
Until your boss gives you that raise or you find a new, better paying job altogether, you have to work with what you have. Unfortunately, when your finances are tangled up paying recurring necessities, you have no way of covering unexpected bills, medical fees, or repairs. Since you can’t get water out of a stone — or an extra paycheck from your budget — you’ll need to search out financial assistance the next time you get slapped with a surprise expense.
When you’re just shy of covering these expenses on your own, a cash advance from an online direct lender is the easiest and most convenient solution to your financial problems. Direct lenders such as MoneyKey have simplified the lending process by eliminating many of the bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through in order to secure a loan. Many lenders, including those at MoneyKey, limit their assistance to $1,000, making their products the ideal addition to a stressed budget. Due to their small size, these repayment terms are easier to accommodate, yet it provides access to essential cash that can save you from late payments, increased interest rates, and damage to your credit rating.
MoneyKey financial solutions offer a variety of products with different rates and terms, depending on where you live. Check out how they make a budget can help you by spending some time exploring their website and seeing what kind of small-dollar loan is available in your area. They may just be able to provide you with a practical way of paying for unexpected, non-recurring expenses within your financial capabilities.
These essential cash advances can cover deficiencies in your income until you’ve created a realistic way of cutting back on unnecessary expenses and increasing your monthly payment. They aren’t, however, supposed to become a permanent fixture of your budget. Use them sparingly and they can help solve your short-term financial problems. But first, you’ll have to face your fears. Make a budget and see where your finances sit. If you’re lucky, you can shave off a few unnecessary expenditures and put more towards savings that cover surprise repairs and bills. If you’re not, there’s always an online direct lender available to help.
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