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Budget Estimator

The concept of using envelopes to save money to pay the bills is an old and trusted method. I don't know who came up with it but I remember my mother using envelopes in much the same way. Of course now we don't get paid by cash but by direct deposit into our accounts, so in reality it is now much harder to budget and have money available to pay the bills as they come due. It takes discipline and a good knowledge of your upcoming bills to avoid spending your money and then realising you have a bill coming up and no funds available.

This program works exactly like the old days of setting a budget. All the expenses are categorised and the cash allocated to each envelope in theory would be placed into each envelope from the weekly pay packet. What was left over was in essence savings. These days, the common practice is to have a separate account that is used for paying bills. The wages would be deposited into the main account and a transfer would be set-up to transfer money across to the bills account. What was left in the main account was the same as having cash left over after filling each envelope.  Using this program you can set-up such an account and transfer money into it on a weekly/fortnightly basis to cover all your recurring bills. When a bill comes up, you will have the money there to pay it. The summary screen will tell you exactly how much you need to put aside for each category, either weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Take note though, you don't necessarily have to put aside money for every category. Just the ones that are important like mortgage, electricity, loans, car maintenance etc. The common everyday or weekly spending items will be in your normal account so you have easy access to it.

I made this as a stand alone program first and then integrated it with Property Manager Lite2. Like all my software, simple in design and easy to use. It is used for estimation only. To set up an accurate budget you need to know exact history of your spending habits. If you want this type of calculator you need a program like Quicken or Microsoft Money and a very strict regime of entering every cent you spend into the program. After doing this for a few months the programs produce a nice graph of how you spend your money. A lot of people seem to have very little knowledge of where their money goes and these types of programs are ideal to get exact figures. For those that have an idea of their spending, can use this program. I have included eight categories to where your money might be disappearing. At the end of the process, you will have an indication of your balance remaining from your income and then compare this to the real life balance of your bank accounts. I have now decided to use the conventional windows help system. Pressing F1 anywhere in the program will bring up a help file specific to the screen you are in. It's not really a program help file as such where I explain how to operate the program. The program does not need this type of help because it is too simple. It is more or less a few tips on how to enter the data.

The following screenshots are 75% of original size taken in XP and are heavily compressed to keep the file sizes down.

	The old traditional envelope system that everyone can relate to. I have just mocked up some figures to show how it looks. At first glance, you can see that in this case I only have approx $1300 left in my bank account after each year of saving. Can't buy much with that. Hopefully your budget will look a little healthier. Initially you will want to save your budget, however there may be times in the future that you want to play around with some categories to see what the budget will look like if you cut back here and there. Then naturally you will not want to change your budget at this stage, so you just Exit and the changes will not stick. After entering into each envelope this screen will update with the totals.
	The first thing to do is enter all the income that you receive from various sources. Once inside, the cursor is in the first field. Enter the dollar amount that you desire, then Tab to the next field and continue to enter your incomes and the frequency you receive them. Click finished when done. Use the mouse and choose another category envelope. At this stage the budget is not saved, it is held in memory. If you want to save each category as you go along, click on the Save Budget button. The blank fields are for naming expenses of your choice. Note. Any income derived from investment properties must be entered manually. In Property Manager Lite this field updates automatically if you have investment properties. The rest of the Category screens all work the same way and require no further explanations.
Note.  Any Rental Property Expenses must be entered manually. In Property Manager Lite, this field updates automatically if you have investment properties.
	Once you have entered into all the categories you can go to the Summary envelope to get a break down of all the totals. I have calculated everything out into weekly, fortnightly, monthly and yearly. This helps to understand your budget. For instance using this mock up I stated that I only had approx $1300 a year spare cash flow. It didn't sound much but when you bring it down to a weekly amount, which is only $25 it sounds much more drastic and should raise alarm bells for you, that you can't go out and just spend your money willy nilly. Your budget is just to tight. There is no room for disasters, so if one happens for instance, where are you going to get the money from. Then it is time to revisit the Budget Estimator and start to closely scrutinise where you spend your money. The best places to look for trimming the budget are in the following categories  1)Living Expenses, 2) Mtr Vehicle, 3) Misc and 4) Leisure. In this case I can easily find a few grand I can trim if it was necessary to tighten the belt. If more was needed then go into the other categories and start trimming where possible.

A question I have been asked a few times is does the program cater for multiple budgets ie. Each member of the family can save their own budget. The answer is YES. The way to do this, is to install the program doing unzipping into different folders, or copy the files within the original installation folder and paste them into different folder names. This way each member of the family will have their own budget saved into their folder.