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.