How to Make a Budget

I have made a budget. 

This budget activity if taken from Ms Garlick's Year 10 Futures and Finance course. You will need to complete the tasks to build up the information that you need for your budget. Ms Garlick makes you do budgets as annual, monthly and weekly because you will have bills that will go out at different times. 

1. Complete the 'Finding Your Career' worksheet to add data on your annual, tax and net income for your ideal first professional job, which are lines 1, 2 and 3 respectively. 

2. Brainstorm the pros and cons of each living situation.

   1. • Finding a flat with multiple bedrooms and then find flatmates to fill the extra bedrooms (aka head tenant). 

      • Finding a flat through a flatmate wanted ad (aka you move into an existing flatting group)

      • Living in a one-bedroom flat or studio apartment. 

3. Complete the 'My Place' worksheet and add the cost of your rent to line 15 on the spreadsheet. 

   1. • Depending on the place you picked, add your utilities costs. Some places include them in the rent, others do not. Utilities are on lines 16-18. 

4. Research the cost of a cell phone plan that works for you and add that to line 19.

5. Complete the 'Travel Costs' worksheet and add the cost of your travel to and from work to line 19 on the spreadsheet. 

6. Create a Meal Plan and Grocery List, then use that list to estimate your grocery costs for a week by adding those items to a grocery store website (Pak n' Save, Countdown/Wools Worth, New World). Add that cost to line 20.

7. Think about your hobbies, interests, and how you enjoy spending your time and research the costs of that to make an estimate for your 'Fun Money.' For example, what does a weekly gym membership, or monthly streaming service cost? Do you like to buy clothes? How much do you typically spend on cloths and how often? Add these costs together to get an estimate of your 'Fun Money' and add that to line 22. 

8. For lines 23-25, decide if you want insurance by completing the Year 10 Futures and Finance Lesson on Insurance. If you choose not to get insurance, make sure you complete lines 36-42 to estimate how much money you should have set aside in a bank account for emergencies. 

9. After completing this task, you should have a total for your expenses, which gets subtracted from your net income. All of that remaining money, you should be saving/investing, which is covered in this lesson here. 

Note that you can adapt this task to be your budget when you're at university, the same principles apply.