A sticky to use for making comments about the budget.

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The advantage of having two time periods on one sheet.

A nice thing about The Working Man's Home Budget is its having two identical columns, each covering one time period. This allows the user to compare his budget from one time period to the next, and to make modifications in the second based on the lesson of the first. Having this feature all in one sheet adds stability to this process of step-by-step learning--you don't have to manipulate two different sheets, instead, you have the compared figures right next to each other.

Learning from writing a budget for residents in a nursing home.

There is a reason The Working Man's Home Budget is so clear and useful. It follows on the creation of a budget for residents at my nursing home. These people are extremely challenged financially. Writing a budget for them was a real pressure cooker, and from that experience writing a budget for a normal person was given an extra boost of understanding.

Pass on the budget!

It has become apparent that those who need The Working Man's Home Budget are not likely to be using a computer. In fact, that's why the budget is ideal for them. It's a notch deeper in their thoughts than a computer application would be.

So I naturally come to the conclusion I need to suggest to anyone visiting the blog here that they think of those they know who would benefit from beginning to budget their income and expenses, and buy them a copy of The Working Man's Home Budget. But please respect the copyright and buy a copy for each person you give it to. It's the law.

A link to the Wikipedia article, "personal budget."

Here is a link to Wikipedia's article, Personal budget. It has a lot of material. Let the buyer beware. My philosophy in economics is keep your balance.

Other terms for the budget.

Other terms for The Working Man's Home Budget may be personal budget, budget sheet, budget planner, or monthly budget.

There is no universal science of the home budget. It comes to a matter of preferences. One informed writer might settle on one set of items, another might settle on another. Furthermore, there is no universal science of layout for the budget, and it does appear that layout is not generally given much strict attention by anyone but me. It seems that the universal rule is that what the budget looks like doesn't matter very much, because after all the person who creates it doesn't have to use it. It seems like the accountants who create them expect you to accept without comment whatever layout choices they make. I believe I have more compassion for the average person than that and I want to sell him a product that will bring joy to his eyes. Other budgets are paperwork. My budget, The Working Man's Home Budget, is art.

Budget now has additional item capacity.

I have now added to The Working Man's Home Budget a provision for additional items, one sheet for budget items, and one sheet for listable items on the budget sheet. The original budget is now "budget, page 1" with subtotals for the two pages and grand totals, one for income and one for expenses, and then the final balance.

Neglect.

The power of a budget is in keeping neglect small. It is a sort of radar view of one's whole world, showing those things which would constitute neglect if left out, or if too small for income and too large for expenses.

The birth of children automatically, for most people, generates neglect, and budgets scramble to reduce it.

Budget inclusions are not dollar calculations. They are calculations of the size of neglect, and its flow from one item to another.

The world as seen by the working man or woman.

Let me say a little bit about the world in which the man or woman who would really benefit from using The Working Man's Budget lives.

The biggest thing he or she faces is pressure. It comes from all directions, and we need to bear it successfully or eventually either something will break or things will tend to fall into a miserable personal depression.

The Working Man's Home Budget will help, because it has all your financial pressures right there in front of you. You can glance down the page and there is a rhythm to them, each item fitting onto one line. This is no trivial feature. Other budgets I have seen cling to an insider's phraseology, using more than one line for an item whose insider wording spills over one line. This breaks the rhythm of the budget. It forces you to rescan these complicated items, just for a moment, losing the rhythm of the budget.

You don't have time to spare in such an important matter as a budget. You need that unbroken rhythm of a perfectly clean layout that you get with The Working Man's Home Budget. So easy to see, so hard to create, and the Working Man's Home Budget creates it.

Besides pressure, there is persuasion. I admit to it. I'm looking to make money. But I have seen people who I thought were probably already keeping a budget tell me, no, they weren't keeping a budget, were interested in mine, and bought one. And this was most of the people I approached. So don't let my hard sell fool you, I am trying to persuade you. But I think I have a better product, so I feel confident I am seeking to make an honest living. We all face persuasion, and come to some understanding of how much of it is okay and how much is too much. It's part of a budget, learning to separate persuasion from real value, and I encourage every working man and woman to separate them.

Another part of the working man or woman's world is decay. We start a new regimen, get excited for a while, and then sluff off gradually and quit. This is a hard one. As much as budgeting is a good idea, it takes persistence, and no amount of excellent advice is going to change this. Let's be honest. I am marketing to the man or woman who is not a natural record keeper. I don't want him to buy the budget and then put it aside forever. I want him to keep it up, make some real changes, and improve his life. I make a sale one day and I'm happy, but I will feel something of a failure if the buyer sets it down and never looks at it again. Find friends to discuss your efforts at budgeting. It will ease the load. And buy a good budget. That's the beginning of good finances.

To make lists that feed into the budget main page.

A budget would be incomplete without a place to make lists that feed into the budget main page. So I have included just that. It provides space for eight items to be subtotaled before entering their results on the main budget page. I also provide one space in each list to rename the item it subtotals, if those I chose are not to your liking.

There is also a column for a memo beside each of the items being subtotaled.

Comparing other budgets to The Working Man's Home Budget.

After looking over other printable budgets available online, I can see a definite difference between these other budgets and The Working Man's Home Budget. Mine, simply put, is a masterwork of order and good sense with money, while the others are by comparison only so much wandering in the dark, and casting about wildly to make contact with a dark world.

The budget's organization.

The budget page of The Working Man's Home Budget covers two time periods identically, side by side. Transfer the final balance from the bottom of the first time period to the beginning balance at the top of the second time period.

The totals for income and expenses are clearly set off for easy figuring of the new balance for a time period.

Everything is located where you would expect it.

The budget works as a hard copy.

The budget file is not an interactive tool. It is intended to be printed and filled out in pencil by the user. This is the way most people do all their important planning, and it makes sense to have a hard copy like this to work over on an ongoing basis as you get your money matters under better and better control over time. Computers are fine when everything is down to a system, but for the hard issues that you have to work over and compromise, estimate, and guess about, you just have to do it with a pencil and paper. So it makes sense to have a good starting point for all the figuring, one that gives you a combination of neatness and orderliness, along with good forethought about how to use the space economically, by sensible decisions of what to include and what not to include, yet providing a little unused space for those things the user may have a special need for that no one else would have thought of.

Thus organized, this budget, The Working Man's Home Budget, is going to be the focal point of your important records, so keep it with them. You may find the fall-out from the beauty of the budget spreads throughout your household in general, and after all, isn't that why you invested in it?

innaugural post

This is the first post on my blog devoted to The Working Man's Home Budget which I wrote for everyone who finds times difficult and figures a good budget is the place to start firming things up a bit and get control of his finances with a well-thought-out budget, neat, simple and listing all the things that must be accommodated because they just can't be done without.

The file for the budget is located on the documents site, scribd.com, and you can link to it on the sidebar at the right. You might have heard about the budget from someone who already has it and suggested you try it out. Practical reality being what it is, you won't get a chance to see the budget until you actually buy it, so referrals are the name of the game, for this budget.

Response to the hard copy has been encouraging, so I have made the file available online this way, to reach a broader audience, and to make the sales operation simple.

Happy budgeting!!