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

STEP ONE: finding 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.

That's it! This is all there is to budgeting. Initially at least. Let us look at these steps one at a time...