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Everyone knows that a budget is important for you to help you plan your finances. That way your expenses won't outstrip your income in that way you won't end up with a nasty surprise.

But how do you budget properly? What is a good way to budget that will help you pay your expenses but still keep some money left over at the end of the month to enjoy life a little bit?

One way to budget is the calendar method. This is how it works. Simply get a copy of the calendar for the following month and get two pens of different colour. With the one coloured pen, write your after tax income on the days that you receive it. For example, if you get paid at the end of the month, write your after tax income on the last workday of the month.

Then, with the other coloured pen, write your average monthly expenses on the days that you typically get them in the mail or on the days they are automatically withdrawn from your account. For example, if you usually get your telephone bill in the first week of the month, write it in somewhere in the first week.

Creating your budget this way, with two different colours, helps you see when money comes into your account and when money goes out of your account. It will quickly highlight problems that may occur. For example, if you get paid at the beginning of the month, but all of your bills come out in the last half of the month, most of your money will be spent before the bills come out which will make it particularly difficult to budget and to pay them off.

Dealing with your many expenses is the next step in your budgeting process. One of the things you may want to consider doing is getting a secured loan to help you consolidate your loans and credit cards and other debts into one easy, fixed monthly payment. Usually by combining all of your debts together into one loan, and usually by making that loan a secured loan, you'll be able to decrease your monthly expenses (which will give you more money to spend how you want) and you will create a fixed monthly payment instead of having several monthly payments of varying amounts.

As you can see, a secured loan is an excellent idea to incorporate into your financial budget.