1. Calculate how much money you earn in a month after taxes. For this budget plan, use your net pay or take home pay. Include tips, supplementary income, side-jobs, investments etc. This is your income.
  2. Figure out your expenses. The best way to do this is to save receipts for a month or even a couple weeks. Knowing how much per month you spend on groceries or gas makes the next part much easier. If you want to start writing your budget today, and don’t have receipts, that’s OK, it’s just a bit more difficult.
  3. Set your goal. Why are you going on a budget? Maybe you want to start saving for college, or maybe you want to get out of debt. Whatever your reason, define your goal clearly so you can determine if you are meeting it or not.
  4. Break your budget up into some basic categories. Some categories you could use are: Housing, Food, Auto, Entertainment, Savings, Clothing, Medical, and Miscellaneous. You might want to organize your expenses into needs - such as your loan and electricity - and wants - such as clothing and entertainment.
  5. List all your spending under each of these categories. Let’s take Auto as an example: $300/month car payment, $100/month insurance, $250/month on gas, $50/month on maintenance, 10$/month on fees such as registration. So, your total Auto budget for the month would be $710/month. If you don’t know the exact amounts you spend, try to make good estimates. The more accurate you are, the better chance your budget has of working.
  6. Once you have broken down all your spending into your basic categories, add it all up. This should show your total monthly spending. Compare it to how much you make each month after taxes.
  7. Obtain some kind of record-keeping method to keep track of your budget. Some people like to use computer programs like Quicken or Microsoft Money. If you prefer you could just use a good old-fashioned ledger book. You can find one at Wal-Mart for about $5.
  8. Set up your ledger. Skip the first 5 or so pages for later, we’ll come back to it. Divide the rest of the ledger into as many sections as you have main categories. Put each main category on the first page of each section. This will give you room for lots of entries in each category. Some categories, like food, are going to need lots of pages.
  9. Decide what period of time you want your budget set up for. I found monthly to be the most useful for me, since most bills are monthly. However, I decided to make the deposits to my budget categories twice a month. In other words, if my Auto budget for the month is $710, I showed "deposits" of $355 in the Auto section on the 1st and 15th of each month.
  10. Show a deposit in each category at the start of each period, then show all the expenditures from that category throughout the period. So, for Auto, you would start off with $710 for the month, then show several expenditures for gas, one expenditure for car payment, maybe one expenditure for insurance(depending on whether you pay insurance monthly or not).
  11. Use that first section of the ledger book to record income and then show the budget being subtracted from it each period. For instance, I get paid every other Friday, so there are corresponding entries in the income section showing income deposits every other Friday. My budget is ~$2800/month, and gets subtracted on the 1st and 15th. So on each 1st and 15th, the income sections shows a budget subtraction of $1400.