Just like any business outfit your personal finances require adequate planning and organization. You need to set the budget for the year, track all expenditure and retained earnings. Buying bookkeeping or an accounting package to help you do this or even consider taking a course in bookkeeping, instead of hiring a bookkeeper.
Hiring a bookkeeper is resource-intensive. Unless you are a wealthy person in need of help to manage your personal finance, you should consider to Do-It-Yourself your personal finance management. Moreover, hiring an ‘outsider’ would put you in a risk of plenty of personal interference that could emerge.
If you really want to avoid the monthly payment to the bookkeeper then it all starts with knowing where you are and you can easily determine where you are going. All this financial planning stuff can be done with some paper or using a template with your favorite spreadsheet package.
Nevertheless, plan your personal finance yourself requires a few processes.
First establish a yearly and monthly household budget. Take record of all your expenses whether daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly. It will shock you as to the length of things or items you expend money on.
Next keep track of all the actual spending and income against the budget you developed earlier. It will help you determine the seasonal aspects of your expenditure. Then over a period of time you would be able to streamline these aspects to assist you maintain a respectable cash flow. The plan is that have money in the bank to pay your expenses but still leave some as your retained earnings. The bank money is for the payment of bills and the one left acts as a cover in cases of emergency spending.
The account at the bank is so crucial that you have to keep track of activities on it. Have a bank register which records all deposits, withdrawals from the bank, ATM, debit machine and check withdrawals. Then do a reconciliation of the register with your monthly bank statements so that you know any differences. It also helps you determine the exact amount of money you have at the bank.
Also take note of your spending through credit cards and other lines of credit. Be very diligent in having one or two credit cards but not multiple. Make a breakdown of all your transactions to separate the normal expenditure from unexpected occurrences.
