Finding out your monthly take-home pay

Your income is your pay, after some money is deducted. Think taxes, insurance and Social Security. Answer the following questions:

What is your monthly take-home pay? Do other people share expenses in your home?

As mentioned before, total all of the households’ monthly take-home pay. This will include all sources of income for all contributing members of the household.

To get us started and in order to set up a monthly budget, follow these five easy steps:

Step one: find out your monthly take-home pay


Step two: find out what your expenses are


Step three: find out how much you spend on each expense


Step four: see if your monthly expenses match monthly take-home pay


Step five: Balance your budget. This means in your family budget you need to ensure that you are spending matches take-home pay. It might indicate that you have to cut back on spending to balance.

It sounds too good to be true and too simplistic. However, in the end, that is all there is to this family budgeting process! Initially at least. Let us look at these steps one at a time.

The Family Budget Process

This brings us to the family budget process. We might ask questions like:
 How to set up a family budget?
 How should a family budget be used?

Insights around the tools and techniques of family budgeting could also be useful:
 Practical suggestions for setting up a budget?
 A step-by-step summary of a family budget process
 Hints, tips, tricks and tools for setting up a family budget

Stay tuned for more…