But thrice, now when I unfold it,
[SOUND] you see a piece of paper with eight boxes.
That's a box for every day of the week plus, a shopping list or
a totals list that you can put on there.
This is something that when you keep it nice and folded up.
Can go right in your shirt pocket, in your jacket pocket,
[SOUND] something you can keep track of with a handy small pen or
pencil, and jot things down as you're making expenses.
This is a pretty nice low tech way,
to keep track of your spending as you're going forward.
So keep all the receipts.
You can keep them with it.
You can staple them to it.
You can put them all in an envelope and indicate that you have the receipts.
You can come up with categories for your expenses once you get a sense of
where your money's going, how much is coming in, and how much is coming out.
And then write these amounts in the UF Money Management Calendar,
every day if you can, or at least once a week.
Take your folded up sheet of paper, and
transfer it to the Money Management Calendar.
Again, a great way to be tracking your expenses.
This is that information we talked about.
It's really hard to plan a budget, if we have no idea where our spending is going.
Right, in other words if we don't have a record of it,
we're just guessing with how much money we spend.
And that can be pretty and
also very dangerous in the sense that we could be dead wrong.
So then we build the budget, we iden, we take a look our expenses and
we figure out what are the fixed, what are the consistent expenses, and
we can think about what some of these are, rent or mortgage.
Utilities may be fixed, depending upon the type of utilities we're talking about.
Our debt payments, whether it's to student loans.
Whether it's to a car.
All of these things can be relatively fixed or consistent in nature.
Meaning that they're going to be the same, from month to month.
We can also have more flexible expenses.
These are expenses that occur regularly.
But they vary from amount to amount.
So food is a great example of this.
Even if we mostly spend our money at the grocery store,
there'll often be some variability with a few dollars here or
there or even more, from each grocery shopping experience.
If we eat out a little bit as part of that time too,
that's also going to vary as well and have some flexibility in it.
And it's flexible also in the sense that we have some control.
We can decide not to do some of these things.
We can decide a little bit ,about what we're going to purchase or
what we're not going to purchase.
The generics versus the name brands, so on and so forth.
And clothing, would be another great example of this.
So, think to yourself, what are some of my flexible expenses?
What are some of the things I have to pay?
What expenses do I have that are the same every month?
And what expenses do I have that go up and down a little bit, that fluctuate?