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* When I quit my job as a teacher to stay home with my daughter, I always had a vague plan in the back of my mind that I would look for ways to make money as a stay-at-home mom. Most tests can be completed within 10 minutes and they will warn you if you are expected to spend a certain time frame on a test or if a test is expected to take more than the average time. If you have always wanted to start a blog but do not know where to start, or if you have already started a blog and feel like you are not making any progress, consider checking out Elite Blog Academy. Since 2014, Elite Blog Academy has been field-tested by bloggers just like me. While $70 a day does not sound like a lot, if you do this once a week, that is around $300 a month.

While we did not have a “formal” budget meeting as a couple each month, we did create a new budget, reviewed how the previous month went, and talked about upcoming expenses that would need to be included in the budget. While we did not end up meeting our goals in their entirety, we are still pretty proud of the progress that we DID make and are looking forward to this year and meeting our financial goals. The key to success in creating and meeting financial goals is to know where your money is coming from, how you are spending it, and what is tying it up (like debt or unnecessary expenses) from being used towards your long term goals. We are determined to meet our grocery and eating out budget each month and using cash only should help us achieve this – once the money is gone, it is gone!

I have been using the best little trick since I can remember to ensure that I do not spend money allocated for savings before I actually save it. I am not sure that most employers even send out paper checks anymore but having your paycheck directly deposited into your account is the first step towards ensuring that your money works for you and not against you! If you only have one bank account, then I highly recommend reading my post about how multiple bank accounts can help your finances. Our family has automatic transfers set up so that each time a paycheck is deposited, a specific amount of money is automatically transferred to our other accounts.

Now that you have created a budget and started to plan out your budget each month each month, it is time to learn to track and manage your budget. I still use a spreadsheet to plan out my budget each month alongside my calendar, but then once I have completed the planning process, I transfer the numbers to my preferred tracking software so that I can easily track and manage my spending and keep up to date on my budget. Once you create your expense categories and add the expense amounts for the current month, you are done and can now start using the software to easily track and manage your budget and spending. Make sure each and every expense gets a label that you have in your budget for that month – if you need to tweak your budget at any point in the month to add a new category or modify an expense amount (within reason)