This will be the sum of every compensation you receive. Currency is the most common of course, but we can track just about anything that you might receive as compensation for your labour. If you’ve got an irregular income, take a look at what you’ve made the last few months and list the lowest amount as this month’s planned income budget line. Or, we can take the average of a few month’s income and use it as a foundation. You can adjust later in the month if you make more and add that extra money to your money goal or another budget line.

Much of the reason that households and businesses end up “in the red”, and fall short of thier goals, is because they don’t keep track of what they’re spending. The money you spend on eating out and going to the movies adds up fast when you aren’t paying attention to it! We can start to recitfy this by categorizing your monthly expenditures, then calculating the percentage of your monthly compensation that you spend on each category. Afterwords, we’ll tailor a table of percentages that works for you and your family and/or your business. Then we’ll formulate a plan to bring your spending in line with that table.

Now we set a schedule to review your progress. A good timeframe would be monthly or quarterly. This can be a self review, or we can do it together. The idea here is to identify areas that can be worked on, areas that may need to be adjusted, to identify new trends in spending, etc.

This is the method we will be using to further break down your budget’s categories. In this system we separate those categories into tiers. Tier 1 being the basic survival categories like rent/mortgage, or utilities. Tier 2 is usually related to transportation, like fuel and insurance. I like to use Tier 3 for fitness, like gym memberships or proteins. You can add or take away as many tiers as you want. This system is especially useful for people who work in the “Gig-Economy” style, or for those who are interested in seeing just how much compensation they actually need to make to live.