Personal Finance Tips

Is your paycheck gone before you know it? Did those credit card bills catch you by surprise again? Christmas shopping set you back more than you planned? Maybe you just can't stop buying CDs and DVDs, even if it means packing a sandwich for lunch instead of eating out with your co-workers? Whatever the reason, if your spending has gotten out of control, then you need to watch our series on creating a personal budget. If you are reading this, you probably can't afford to pay for any finacial advice. Lucky for you, all you need to know is right here in these free videos from Expert Village.

Tom Noah has been a CPA for more than 27 years, helping people to manage their spending and finances. In these budgeting videos, he will give you some tips to slow down your spending and show you how to use Microsoft Excel to balance your personal budget. He discusses budget formulas and tells you how to keep track of monthly bills. You will also find out how to get control of your credit card interest. Learn the right way to spend your money by watching these money management clips. Then you may not feel so guilty about buying all of those cds and dvds!

"I'm going to talk about preparing a simple family budget. Here we have the budget and the date. This is for the month January 2008. In this column we list the item and you can see the various items listed here down to a total for total monthly bills. The next column is the status of the bill. I like this because it just let's you track if the bill has been paid, whether you have received the bill but not yet paid it. Whether you are waiting for the bill to come in. The pay type maybe online, it may be a bank draft where they just draft the amount from your account or you may mail it in. So I have these noted here on this column D. Amount paid this is what we paid during the month, budget amount this is what we expect to pay each month. Budget minus paid this is the difference between the budget amount and the amount paid. So it tells how close we are to our budget. I added this column amount owed so we can keep track of our total amount that is owed on our house, our cars, credit cars that type of stuff so we know how this is increasing or decreasing over time. Date paid this is just sorted so that we know when we are paying our bills, what day of the month we are paying them on. Due date is when these bills are due. I have added a column for interest so I know what I owe on credit cards and certain loans we can track how much the interest is. In the available credit this is on credit cards just so we know how much is available based on the credit limit and the amount that we owe. Down on this section we have other expenses including food, house hold, clothing, entertainment, vacation and savings. Down here you have the monthly pay for John and Mary that we are tracking. Down here over and under is the difference between the total pay and the total amount we spend each month."