How do I get started with bookkeeping?

Heading the basics of financial literacy. Everyone talks a lot about keeping your home bookkeeping, planning and editing your family budget. But for a long time I did not succeed, simply because of the lack of discipline. I record inconsistently and sometimes, entire months fall out of my household tally. But despite this , today I know exactly the minimum necessary family expenses, average incomes, average expenses, and in general everything why you should bother with family accounting.

First, I always write down all my income. I work unstably, and therefore incomes vary greatly from month to month.

Secondly, I always write down all expenses. My expenses are divided into categories:

Charity

Fuel and car maintenance

What I spend on work – tools, loans, materials, purchase of goods, websites, advertising, salaries to employees, etc.

Maintenance of own and parental housing – repair

Communal – rent, telephone, Internet, well, almost 25% of earnings, given that I do not have a rented apartment

Household products – food, clothing, haircuts, dishes

Health – I specifically put aside for health, I really directly force myself to spend money on doctors, go to the clinic, drink vitamins and so on. I used to spend urgently when I get sick or need to

Investments – everything is clear here

Nonsense – cafes, Coca-Cola, cookies, chewing gum, sausage, movies and more. Basically something you can't live without.

Initially, I wrote everything in a notebook, and then put everything in Excel, printed it out on the wall. Today I'm doing it in the Monefy Pro program on my phone. Not advertising.

Thirdly, I artificially seek to cut unnecessary spending and increase spending on relationships with family and friends, on charity and on health. That we need to earn more is obvious.

It so happened, I grew up in a family where money was spent emotionally and always on the basis of what fell, urgently spent. This is due to the fact that, for as long as I can remember, we have always had a constant lack of funds, and if the financial “hole" is not urgently closed, then the money will scatter for food, and the “holes” will remain. I started my independent life with exactly the same views.

It was the end of 2013, we worked at a construction site, installing heating. The payment was piecework, as usual, they didn't give us even half of the money we earned, a lot of hemorrhoids, shell companies, frank unpunished legal theft of money from the owners by the developer, framed the installers, in general, everything is as always. There was a friend Tolik (name changed) in the brigade, who was in training and could not earn piecework, we put him on a salary so that he would be in the back room, receive money consistently, and not suffer from the usual problems described above at a construction site, such as ” You guys worked here, so we don't owe you money, but you owe us money here. So Tolik earned good money, but he always lacked money. The whole team ate homemade grubs and the cheapest products from the store, Tolik bought everything he wanted, drank energy drinks every day, went to McDonald's.no money. Well, I offered him to do home bookkeeping together, so that it would be easy for him to understand how he spends money irrationally. It ended up that from the end of 2013 I got involved, and to this day he does not believe that it is necessary to write down expenses, he sits without money, but at the same time he spends ten times more money on cafes than I do. And I have a lot of such friends and acquaintances, which is a pity. Home bookkeeping is the second step towards achieving personal financial goals.