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31 Day Budget (Day 2): Sorting Your Finance

January 2, 2015 at 9:10 am 4 Comments  

31 Days to a Better Budget

Sorting Your Finances

Each day of the series offers new tips, ideas and a challenge to start the year with a solid financial plan.


We spent yesterday getting organized to create a new budget. Once you have your pile of bills, statements & income in one place, you can start to make some sense out of it. Spending a few minutes now, sorting the paperwork, will help with the next steps in the budgeting process. Don’t look at the amounts yet, don’t stress over the size of your bill pile. Just group each item into the following categories:

  • Recurring bills
  • Fluctuating bills
  • One-time bills
  • Credit card statements
  • Insurance
  • Bank statements
  • Pay stubs

Paperclip or band each stack together—we’ll be working with them throughout the week. This is going to help, not only with creating a monthly budget, but with differentiating between bills, debt, household expenses and discretionary expenses—key information when it comes time to start tweaking the budget.

This is your only project for today—we’re keeping it light, because those numbers can be overwhelming when you are just starting out with a budget. Try not to look at them today, though—we’ll begin tackling that part later in the week. When you’ve finished today’s challenge, leave us a comment, shout it out on Facebook or use the #31DayBudget hashtag on Twitter—I’d love to share in your success!


I’m not a financial planner or a budget expert. I’ll just be walking you through the steps I take each time my budget needs an adjustment. In fact, I’ll be participating myself!

Filed Under: Budgeting Tagged With: 31 Day Budget

About Heather Sokol

Heather Sokol is the founder of Inexpensively. She has been married to Spencer for many, many years. Together, they have five kids, fourteen pets, seven fish, and a web development company. What they lack is sanity.

More from Inexpensively

  • 31 Day Budget (Day 5): Tracking Expenses
  • pile of bills31 Day Budget (Day 1): Getting Organized
  • 31 Day Budget (Day 3): Plugging in the Numbers
  • Budgeting31 Day Budget (Day 12): Reducing Discretionary Expenses

Comments

  1. krantcents says

    January 2, 2011 at 11:37 am

    Thanks for the tips. A systematic approach always works. Happy New Year.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. 31 Day Budget (Day 5): Tracking Expenses | Inexpensively Frugal Blog Network says:
    January 5, 2011 at 8:51 am

    […] new budget. But, not right now. For today, just go through the same process you did when you were sorting bills. This time, with receipts or bank statements, calculate how much you spend on everyday essentials, […]

    Reply
  2. 31 Day Budget (Day 12): Reducing Discretionary Expenses | Inexpensively Frugal Blog Network says:
    January 12, 2011 at 3:58 pm

    […] you have sorted receipts, or if you’ve been tracking expenses, the next step will be easy. Write down how much you […]

    Reply
  3. 31 Day Budget (Day 3): Plugging in the Numbers | Inexpensively Frugal Blog Network says:
    January 23, 2015 at 2:35 pm

    […] easier to deal with (both literally and figuratively). Now that you have organized paperwork & sorted bills, it’s time to start tackling the numbers. Whether you use budgeting software, a spreadsheet […]

    Reply

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