Some people I know ask me how I budget my money. Well, I use made up sentences to do it. They help me control my spending and make tracking of my expenses easy. Here's how I do it.
First of all, I've already made myself aware of my usual monthly expenses. Then, I take out the initial from each expense category and bring them all together so I can create an easy to memorize sentence which represents all my expenses. Example: M for mortgage and R for rent. I can make up MR out of these letters to remind myself of the two expense categories.
To get to the point, the sentence I brainstormed to make up and which I am currently using is MR FIGHT GO BLEW CUPS. For sure this sentence does not make sense. Well it doesn't really have to make a logical sense! Just as long as I find it easy to remember, then that should be settled.
Here's what they actually mean to me:
M-ortgage
R-ent
F-amily
I-nternet
G-rocery
H-ealth
T-ransportation
G-asul
O-thers
B-igas
L-aundry
E-lectricity
W-ater
C-hurch
U-tang
P-agkain
S-tuff
So whenever I get my pay, I will just get a pen and paper, write down this sentence and budget my money. With this, I never miss a single expense category. And when there's an uncommon expense, it always just goes under Others category.
The only challenging part for me though is coming up with a sentence that incorporates all of them. Other than that, the rest is history.
Over time though, new initials will be added as I acquire new expenses and I probably have to modify the sentence a bit. It constantly evolves, so to say, in order to fit the new ones in.
