Do you know, with some accuracy, how much you spend to maintain your household? Do you know how much money you need a month to maintain your basic needs if you were to lose your job? Do you know how much cash is left each month after your basic needs are met and where that money goes? Do you have a short or long term fiscal goal, like a home or vehicle purchase, a dream vacation, or getting out of debt, and do not know where to start? Establishing a personal or household budget is a worthwhile endeavor, especially in today’s high inflation environment as maybe you suddenly lost that cushion between income and outgo.
As befitting our group’s mandate, I will use technology, freely available, as long as you have Internet access at home and a smartphone to record purchases in real time. To create and maintain the budget, I will be using Google Sheets, a browser based spreadsheet following the Microsoft Excel 97 public domain specs. I will use Google Drive for storage. With this setup, you can use your favorite device for budgeting, be it desktop, laptop, pad, or phone. A checkbook app for a smartphone will be used to record any and all non-recurring transactions eliminating the headache of accounting with paper receipts. Following, are instructions for setting up a Google Drive and step by steps for creating a Google Sheets Budget. For those users that are already familiar with Excel 97, I will provide a built out budget spreadsheet that can be downloaded and altered for your own requirements.
ESTABLISHING AND OPERATING A HOUSEHOLD BUDGET
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I recently found this advertisement from around 1978 while sorting through the contents of my filing cabinet. It may have been the first PC related scam. This flyer was sent to every PC retailer in the country. Not one diskette drive was ever shipped. If you could find one, a single sided TRS-80 drive was more than double this price, required the purchase of the expansion interface, and was somewhat unreliable. The data capacity of a double sided 5.25 in diskette was 256,000 characters.
