Smart Saving Investing

How to Create a Budget – Part 2 of 4

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by

Bill
in

Part 2 – Non-Fixed Expenses

In How to Create a Budget – Part 1, I talked about using budgets as a guide, listing your income and writing down your fixed expenses like rent or your mortgage payment, utilities, savings, Roth IRA, etc. that occur every month.

ParagliderI also discussed using spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org office suite to create your budget. I also mistakenly put this line in there “Here’s a list of spreadsheets to confuse the hell out of you but a lot of them mean well.” and I didn’t provide any spreadsheets. I’m saving those for Part 4.

What are non-fixed expenses? Non-fixed expenses are the items that you pay at various times through out the year. They are not the variable items we’ll talk about in Part 3 – Variable Expenses where you might have more control over variable items but you might not have any or very little control over non-fixed expenses.

They include:

  1. Car repairs and on-going maintenance – changing oil, rotating tires, etc.
  2. Medical expenses – Doctor visits, medicines, etc.
  3. Birthday and Christmas gifts, etc.
  4. Various taxes and insurance payments – car, moped, property, etc.
  5. Fees – parking, transportation, dues, etc.

The list can go on and on but these are just some examples to think about when you’re creating your non-fixed (or should I call them non-fixed, fixed expenses) expenses.

Here’s the updated super simple fictitious spreadsheet including non-fixed expenses:

Super Simple Fictitious Budget

Well that’s it for this post. Pretty simple so far. If you have any questions or concerns let me know by way of a comment.

For now, I’ll break out that second box of Hot Tamales Candy I mentioned in Part 1, since working on budgets isn’t too much fun, there’s got to be some joy in the process besides the joy you’ll feel knowing what’s coming in ($$) and what’s going out (-$$). Have a great day!! 🙂 DANG!! How do they make them so chewy!!

The problem is, I went to the dentist this afternoon for my every six months cleaning. You feel so good after you leave with that feeling your teeth have been cleaned of everything bad that you’ve eaten the previous six months and it just doesn’t matter anymore. And now this…candy. Arghhh.