Free Budget Planner Worksheet

What do you do when there is a drastic change in your income?  What if a spouse loses his or her job. First you need  a budget worksheet.

1. Budgeting Worksheets.

Here is a sample budgeting worksheet.

TV

Cell phones

Heating

Internet

Telephone

Electric

Car Insurance

Life Insurance

Newspapers

Christmas

Grocery

Household

Clothing

Personal

Transportation: car payment

Liscence Plates

Gasoline

Entertainment

Miscellaneous

 

2. Start with the Old Budget

If you had a budget before you can start with that.  Fill in the amounts you have been spending in each category. This is your starting point. If you have been spending $100 a week for groceries,  you can adjust that downward as neceassary.  If this is difficult start with a small 10% cut across the board.  This is a peocess. It probably won’t be done overnight.

3. Modify the Old to Create a New Budget

Like I mentioned above you can reduce everything by 10% to make the process simpler.  If you feel that is too much in some cases you can modify that to 5%.  Other categories many need to be reduced even more for example 15% or even 20%.

One thing I did recently was to estimate the total decrease in “take home” income from loss of a job.  The difference was estimated to be  $8 an hour.  I then multiplied that by 40 hours to get a $320 goss change in income for each week.  This helped me to develop a target for new total gross income. I estimated the total change to be 35%. In other words if total take home income was $1000 a week the new total is estmated to be $650.

 

 

4. Establish Your New Budget

Now you can establish your new buget by reducing each category by the percentage you esablished you need. Go down through all the categories and multiply by 65%.  (Since 65% is 100% – 35%.)  You will actually muliply by 0.65 to get the number you are looking for. When you have done all that, the hard work is done.  Budgeting is fun for me since I like numbers. Now you are ready to try out your new budget.

 

5. Put Your New Budget to the Test

Now is the time to test out your new budget to make sure it works for you.  Each person will have different needs.  Do not be afraid to tweek your new budget a little more.  You need to be comfortable with your new spending plan.

How to Start From Scratch

If you have not been using a budget, then you will need to establish what your current spending pattern are by recording all your expenditures for a period of one month or 30 days. You can make this fun if you try.  There are likely to be some surprises, both good and bad.  Do not worry.  This process will help you gain control over your spending.

 

Modify Your Baseline budget

You can now modify your current spending patterns to put them in line with your newly required spending patterns. When you get to this point you have really accomplished something. Give yourself a pat on the back.  Give yourself a reward for the work you have done.  Rewards I find are a good motivator.   I think you will too.

I believe this exercise in budgeting will be helpful for many people.  Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I welcome them.

Please feel free to share your discovery of this article in social media or email below. Thank you for reading this.

WordPress themes to build opt email list

I came across an article online about themes that help you build your email list. Building an email list is a big deal because it helps your readers stay in touch with you if they are interested in what you have to offer. The article is called “25+ Powerful WordPress Themes Designed to Grow Your Email List” 

Decisions

Focus Pro

I am in the process of trying to decide which one I want to try.  Right now I am thinking seriously about “Focus Pro”.  It is simple but it has lots of options for customizing. It has a newsletter sign up form to the right. It is a reponsive theme. It is on the Genesis framework.. It allows for custom text, social media icons, custom menus, custom backgrounds. It has 3 color schemes and 6 different layouts. It is $99.95 total.

Just Landed

Another I am considering is “Just Landed”.  As the name suggests it is a landing page theme.  It allows for a/b testing of different landing pages so you can see which one performs the best. This is important to help you build your list faster. It also offers feature lists, testimonials, pay icons, social media icons, It allows you to easily integrate your mailing list with Aweber and Mailchimp support. It has very good customer service. This one is listed at $58.

Balance

This is another simple theme on the Genesis framework.It is balanced. It has a newsletter sign up form. It is priced at $79.97

As you can see there are many other options.  Some are even free.  Others are of the countdown variety to a new site .going live. I reccomend you read the original article for more details if you are interested.

If you are intested in building a good money-making website I suggest you see my review of Wealthy Affiliate.

Please comment on this if you will. I believe this will be helpful.

Share this on social media too. Thanks for reading this. I am trying help you retire richer.

10 things that help you earn money with blogging

Here are 10 little things that help you earn money with blogging. These can make a real difference in your earnings.

 

1. Set up an affiliate account with Amazon.  This is one of most well-known and trusted sites you could work with.

2. Go to Amazon.com and set up your affiliate link for the product you choose. I have psts on each of the above steps.

3. Build traffic by good use of the keyword tool. See post on the keyword tool. Type in ” keyword tool” in the search box.

4. Build authority by writing about your own experience.  Write about what you know through experience or reasearch..

5. Write about what you love. This will you get you through the difficult times.

6. Blog frequently.  I need to publish twice as much as I am doing now. I have been publishing only once a week.  I published less than that during the holidays.

7. Help your readers solve a problem. That will make your blog useful.

8. Have a variety of subjects, lenghts and formats.

9. Capture the email address of your viewers so you can stay in touch with them. I need to work on this. I found an article on “25+ powerful WordPress themes designed to grow your email list”. Google this for more details. One is called Focus Pro which is very good and costs only $99.95. Another is JustLanded which allows you to test different landing pages conversion rates.

10. Get comments on your blog.  This shows engagement with your readers..

11. A good way to learn these things and a whole lot more is to join Wealthy Affiliate

 

I hope you found this interesting and helpful. Please feel free to comment.  Please share this with others too on social media. Good luck !

How to Make Money by Blogging

I searched for paberback books on blogging and here is one of my favorites.

My Blogging Secrets: A Guide to Becoming a Pro-Blogger.

by Amber L. McNaught         $12.99 pb

I wrote about my experience signing up for Amazon Associates (affiliate program. Here I want to write about my experience with setting up the affiliate link.

First I clicked on the Become an Affiliate line at the bottom of the page after clicking on amazon.com. Next I entered the tittle of the book for which  I wanted to create a link. That was the book title above starting with “My Blogging Secrets.”

I found I needed to include the author on the search line on the Associates Cenral page. This will narrow down the list.  Each book or product will have it’s own code.  My code for my website is already included in the code. After I found the book there were was a lfew lines of code.  I clicked on the HTML orange button at the bottom of the code. This highlights the code.

The next step is to copy the code and paste it into the website page. To copy the code I held the control key and then pushed the C key. This copies the code. (I was afraid I might have retype all of the code. That was not the case.)

The next step I did was to go to my website page. Then I held the Control key and then hit V key. I placed it at the bottom of my page of my post on my blog. 

The lines of code were placed on my blog post page.Everything looked ok at this point.At one time there was image and text of the “My Blogging Secrets” book on my page. It said shop now.  I clicked on the shop now button.  I did buy the book.by the way. But the image and text disappeared.  I am still working on how to get a text link to stay on my page.

This will have to be continued on another post.I just tried the text code that is at the bottom of the page and it worked. Harrah. It went the the detail page for this book.

You can order My Blogging Secrets from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod… Enjoy the book.  Please comment on this article or ask questions etc. Thanks.