Recently, I have discovered that I have a problem that needs to be solved. My crisis is that my monthly household expenses exceed my monthly household income. In order to solve or alleviate this dilemma, I have decided to approach this out of balance condition with thorough, sensible reasoning and research, in hopes that I can lower my monthly expenses. Since I know for a fact that I cannot immediately increase my monthly income, then I also know that I need to decrease my expenses in order to achieve more of a balance.
The first step in solving my quandary was to calculate my monthly household income. That was easy enough to do by looking at my pay advices, and all other direct deposit activity in my bank account. The next thing I had to determine was where my income was going each month. To do this, I developed an excel workbook, which would allow me to list all of my payees and the amounts that I normally pay to each of them on a monthly basis.
Expense Account
Expense Reports
Expense RatioIn conjunction with this spreadsheet I also had to log onto my online banking service, so that I could capture expenses that were not of a regular monthly payment nature.
What I found in the analysis phase of my problem solving assignment was astounding. I came upon large amounts of money being spent on miscellaneous items at Wal-Mart, a large amount of e-bay activity, and some various oddly recurring accounts that were actually un-necessary.
Now I was ready to start taking some action. I knew that as a result of my analysis of the predicament, the main solution was going to be that I needed to reduce my expenses. Therefore, I added an additional worksheet to my excel workbook that...