Managing a budget is like everything ... it can be learned.
Have you always carefully avoided money matters that bore you or stress you out?
If learning financial control is not a dream, it is nevertheless a guarantee of autonomy and independence.
Especially since a few simple rules are enough to keep control of your money.
Establish a budget
When you can't make a positive end of the month, when the money always seems to come out and never come in and you are constantly afraid of not being able to cope with the next expense, you have to take things in hand by making a complete inventory of its situation.
And it goes through a table showing all your resources and expenses.
Or a… budget.
To do this, take your bank statements over several months, in order to identify the essential costs such as rent, electricity, savings, credit, transport, insurance, etc. Then do the same with expenses dedicated to food.
Finally, point out all your other "non-essential" cash outflows.
Target your priorities
After establishing your budget, you have to manage it. It is better that the fixed charges are debited automatically at the beginning of the month, so that you no longer have to think about it. If you haven't already, schedule an automatic transfer for your savings (without overestimating the amount), rather than hoping to have some money to put aside at the end of the month.
Since you have made the accounts of your food shopping, it may also be an opportunity to change your habits, in order to be more efficient and more economical.
Likewise, to please yourself without ending up in the red, learn to spend better by comparing prices and separating things out between want and need.
To stay reasonable, you can plan a dedicated budget and why not use a bank notification that will alert you when you have reached the set amount.
Optimize your means of payment
There are several tools that can help you manage your expenses.
With a tight budget, it is for example not recommended to multiply the checks, the late collection of which can quickly put you in difficulty.
As for your bank card, you can choose to prefer it with systematic authorization to prevent any risk of overdrafting, or at least with immediate debit to have a constantly updated account balance.
Conversely, deferred debit can allow you to delay payments until your payroll, since all transactions are debited on the last day of the month.
But it is still necessary that your salary is paid before the 30th or the 31st and not at the beginning of the following month.
Follow up
Without having your nose in your accounts at all times, take advantage of online banking services to keep an eye on your transactions and set reminders in the event of a low balance or a large expenditure.
This way, you can anticipate overdrafts.
More generally, it is wise to restrict yourself to a small regular point of your expenses when doing your accounts.
Most banks also make your job easier by allowing you to gradually categorize your expenses by topic (housing, food, leisure, health, etc.), then display a summary on a dashboard.
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Services to the rescue
Are you worried about diving into your accounts? Don't panic, there are many tools there to help you. Lesclesdelabanque.com (the service of the French Banking Federation), for example, provides two customizable budget tables for families and young people, as well as an advice booklet. The financial education site Lafinancepourtous.com also offers a whole file on the subject and several spreadsheets intended to take stock of your income and expenses. More broadly, the national portal Mesquestionsdargent.fr lists all the reliable tools and simulators for learning to do your accounts.
The most connected will also find their happiness in the wide choice of mobile financial management applications, online banks and other account aggregators that make it easier to control your daily expenses.
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