If you are wondering how to budget, don’t worry—you are not alone. Many people don’t know where to begin when it comes to budgeting and controlling their spending. By following the instructions below and utilizing our free budgeting worksheet, you won’t just know how to budget, you will understand why budgeting is so important to a successful financial future.

Step 1: Determine your income.

The first step in any budget is making note of income.

Using the worksheet: In Section 1 of our downloadable budgeting worksheet you will find a place to record your income. Make sure that you include all income sources.

Step 2: Record your expenses.

Next, we have to look at where your household income is going in order to better determine how to budget it. If you truly want to understand your current financial situation, then you should pull out your last 3 or more bank statements and use the spending history reflected on them to determine your average monthly spending.

Using the worksheet: Record the amounts in the appropriate category of the first column in Section 2 of the budgeting worksheet. If you have expenses that we did not include in the budgeting worksheet then use the fields marked Other to record these expenses. Be sure to type in exactly what the expense is so that you do not forget.

Step 3: Analyze the difference between income and expenses.

The difference between income and expenses is the first important point in any budget because it reveals both over-spending and under-spending issues.

Using the worksheet: At the very bottom of your budgeting worksheet, you should now see a number in the Difference between income and expenses field. If the number is red, then you are consistently spending more than you make. This often means that you have little retirement or other savings and consistently increasing credit card balances. In order to get your finances back on track, you must begin to reduce your expenses. You also have the option of finding additional income but often it is much easier to just reduce your spending.

If the number in the Difference between income and expenses field is black, then that means you spend less money each month than you make and you deserve a pat on the back. But wait—you aren’t quite done yet because spending less than you make is great but it doesn’t mean that you are spending your money wisely and building up your savings as much as you should be.

Step 4: Change your spending.

Changing your spending allows you to create more effective spending and saving patterns. It helps you fix over-spending, correct under-spending and stop digging yourself into a financial hole.

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Using the worksheet: Use the second column of Section 2 to adjust your spending numbers. The first expenses you can attack are those that are completely changeable like shopping, dining out and personal care. Often, the money spent on these categories could have better been spent reducing debt and increasing savings. If you are spending more money each month than you make then these areas are the first that you should cut or reduce.

If the cuts and reductions you are able to make in those categories do not reduce your spending enough, it’s time to review your grocery expenses. While you can’t cut food out of your budget altogether, you can research inexpensive recipes and switch to store brand items in order to reduce your spending.

The next category to review is your insurance expenses. It may be possible to reduce some of your coverage limits if you are over-insured. You can also talk to your insurance agent about increasing your deductibles to reduce your premiums but this is not a step to be taken lightly. If you raise the deductibles too high you could have trouble making yourself whole after an insurable incident and if you make your limits too low you might not get fully reimbursed for claims.

By this point, you should have some extra money in your budget so you can increase spending toward debt repayment and savings.  Your first priority should be paying off bad debt because every month that you pay interest on bad debt you are wasting money.

Once you have planned your attack on bad debt, review your retirement, college and other savings accounts and determine whether or not you are saving enough money each month. If not, manipulate the numbers on the budgeting worksheet to correct that.

As handy as this how to budget tutorial and worksheet may be, there is one thing it cannot do–make you stick to your new budget. Unfortunately, financial discipline is something that only you can control and practice. Without financial discipline your budget is just another piece of paper but with it, your budget is the key to a financially sound future.

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You must have seen several ads about how to get “free” money for your small business. Is there really free money available for your businesses?

While the government does offer grant money, it is not easy to qualify or receive as some may lead you to believe.  There are hundreds of scams out there that entice small business owners with the promise of free money, for a small fee.

These scams work by guaranteeing that you will get a small business grant or you will get all your money back.  They charge you a fee of about $50 for a packet with information on how to write your grant proposal and a list of organizations that can provide the grant you are looking for.  Unassuming business owners pay this fee and receive information with a list of organizations that don’t give any business grants.  When you try and get your money back, you find that the guarantee was just a hog wash.

Does that mean there are no small business grants?

There are, but are rare, and the information you need to find and apply for the legitimate grants is available “free” of charge. For businesses that qualify, there is a possibility of getting free grants from the county, state and city governments.  There are also some private corporations and foundations offering these grants.

Grants for Technology Startups

Businesses that stand the best chance of getting grants are technology startups. As long as they match the extremely stringent requirements, the federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology (STTR) programs are there to help. They award more than $2 billion in grant funding each year.

Small Technology Focused Businesses

Many state and city governments offer grants for small businesses that focus on technology. In Ohio, TechColumbus offers grants to help entrepreneurs test their ideas and see if they can actually run a business. In Philadelphia, The Ben Franklin Partnership and in Gardiner, Maine, the Maine Technology Institute are just a few of the many organizations that help local tech companies out.

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Non-Tech Businesses

Small Business Certifications – Non-tech businesses may not find it as easy as tech-focused businesses to get a grant. But it is still possible if you do the needful. The first thing to do is to check if the business qualifies for special small business certifications, such as minority-owned, woman-owned, veteran-owned business or disadvantaged business. The state and federal governments usually give preference to such business owners.

Economic Development Agencies – You can then look at the economic development agencies or similar agencies in your local area.  Many of these agencies offer government-sponsored grants in an attempt to help with the expansion of existing businesses, help new businesses get started, train employees etc. For example, workforce training grants are offered by the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council for businesses in the counties.

Get Grant Information – The next step would be to sign up at Grants.gov and get information related to different kinds of federal grants.  It may not be easy to qualify directly, but it is certainly possible to get a part of the funding with a little innovative thinking and some networking.

Workforce Training Grants – Workforce training grants are a great source of funds. Many states have these grants and you can check out for grants within your state.  You will also be able to get more information through community colleges or workforce investment board.  Some states fund more than $10 or $20 million which helps hundreds of companies.

Foundation Grants – You can also look at foundation grants at the Foundation Center that provides you information on U.S. based foundations, public charities that give grants as well as corporate giving programs. While grants from these places are meant for non-profit organizations, you can make use of them intelligently by creating a non-profit front for your small business.  You can attach a non-profit section to your existing services or products business.  For example, a children’s theatre company can have a non-profit section that teaches after-school acting classes.

Irrespective of the grant you apply for, you must understand that the cash is usually meant for funding specific products or projects, not for companies.  If you are looking for free money, you must also be ready to fit into the requirements by making changes to your business structure as needed.

Apart from that, businesses that do obtain grants cannot spend the money as they please.  They will have to abide by the strict rules and regulations concerning how the money can be spent and the percentage of money that can be used for specific purposes. These requirements will have to be complied with.

If you’re in business, you want to make money. When you invest time or money into something, you expect to see a return on investment (ROI). In fact, the goal is to maximize that ROI. But your potential customers aren’t always eager to spend money with you. How can you set yourself apart from the competition, make potential customers or clients love you even before spending anything, and manage to turn them into buyers?

Easy. Give them something for free.

I tell freelancers this all the time. Give your knowledge away — not all of it mind you. Some people are just too protective. They figure they should charge for everything they have to offer. That’s silly though. Here’s why:

Why Freebies Lead to More Sales

When you give something away for free, you’re attracting leads. Will everyone convert into a paying customer? No. But the conversions can be just as high (if not higher than) other lead generation tactics like advertising. It can cost far less up front too (improving your ROI even more).

Think of freebies as a base for an up-sell. This happens quite often in publishing. For example, a free excerpt of a book might be given to magazine publishers (and therefore their readers). The idea is to suck them in and entice them to the buy the book. It’s true of information products online too. Let’s look at a hypothetical example.

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Let’s say you run an online consulting program or course on SEO. There are a lot of people giving SEO advice, and you need to set yourself apart if you want people to actually pay. You already have a decent selling point in that you run a highly successful SEO firm that regularly wipes the floor with the competition. But you need more.

You also know that not everyone can afford your comprehensive course (let’s say you’re charging $199 for a four week course). To bring in more revenue from those people, you decide to assemble some complementary information into an introductory e-book which you’ll sell for $27. Now you can reach people at the higher price point, but still monetize those in a lower-budget market.

Your e-book is setup to be a lead-in to the course. The intention is to convert some of those e-book buyers into course subscribers later on, after they’ve realized that A) you know what you’re talking about, B) your information is high quality and not just reiterating what they already know, and C) they like your style enough to want to pay more to learn more from you.

To get people to buy that e-book as a lead-in to your SEO course, you could then turn to freebies. Free stuff has a bigger potential of spreading virally via word of mouth than a paid product does (in most cases).

In this case let’s say you decide to release a shorter free report on SEO, and you make it available for download on your website. It will be much easier for you to drive leads to your site for a freebie than for that $199 course. You also convince prospects to take a closer look at your style and information without a commitment. They love that. (And if your website is monetized by ad revenue, you might even make money in the process that way as you drive traffic there for the freebie.)

Those free reports (or the opt-in list you build when people sign up to get that freebie) should then try to up-sell people to the e-book if they want to learn more beyond the report. Then those people who purchase the e-book will see further promotion for the course for “advanced” information on SEO. Do you see how up-selling works? It tends to work very well when you start with freebies as your base — more initial eyes as the word of mouth spreads.

You’ve seen an example of how giving away freebies can lead to more sales. But what kinds of freebies can you give away? You’re not limited to free reports (although they can be effective). Here are some ideas to get you started.

Business Freebie Ideas to Attract More Buyers

Consider using any of the following types of freebies to generate more business leads to drive to your paid products and services:

• E-books (how-to varieties work nicely)
• Reports covering an industry issue
• White papers (great if you’re targeting executive-level decision makers)
• Software
• Apps for Facebook, iPhone, etc.
• Blogs (free advice on those blogs)
• Forms or templates (including Web templates or blog themes)
• Promotional products (sticky notes, pens, keychains, bookmarks, etc.)
• Excerpts of a larger project (good for information products)
• Free consultations
• Free membership sites (for more exclusive information — lets you build an email list)
• Videos

You don’t have to use all of these freebie types. It can actually be best to focus on just one or two at a time (otherwise you’ll spread your promotional time and budget too thin). Here’s something else that’s important to keep in mind:

When you choose a business freebie to help you attract more customers and sales, make sure it’s worth the investment. For example, if your projections don’t show that you’ll earn a significant profit on all of those pens and keychains, skip them and try something else. Remember that they’re supposed to help you improve your bottom line, not hurt it.

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Figure out what types of freebies might attract the buyers you’re looking for, and see if it makes sense for you to invest some time or money up front to put together those freebies. The leads you’ll generate in the long run can make freebies well worth the investment. Don’t overlook them in your marketing mix just because there’s no immediate financial return. Business is a long-haul game.

Earlier, we posted an article about how to conduct a training needs analysis (TNA). Many readers of that article expressed interest in sample questionnaires for an analysis of the sort described.

There is no single “one size fits all” questionnaire that can serve this purpose. Company requirements vary too widely, and any analysis of an employee base must be tailored to that specific group and the unique attributes of their work. That said, it is possible to share with our readers examples of the kinds of things that assessment instruments ask, with the understanding that these must of course be customized for the particular workplace being analyzed.

Sample Surveys

The previous article mentioned several components that may be chosen as elements of a TNA.  These approaches included observation, interviews, surveys, job description analysis, difficulty-of-task analysis, problem-solving conferences, identification of motivating personality factors, and analysis of organizational policies.

For the sake of providing a useful example in this limited space, we will focus on surveys. The reasons for this are threefold. First, no matter how a TNA is constructed, at some point it must entail direct input from the individuals who are candidates for training. Surveys accomplish this handily, and are perhaps the most frequently used tool in such analyses.

Second, a survey has arguably the broadest reach of any TNA methodology applied throughout an organization, so it is a high-value tool that offers a lot of “bang for the buck.”  Finally, once a survey is created, any interviews which are conducted can use that form as a starting point for more open-ended oral interviews. In this manner the survey does double duty, supporting more than one TNA technique.

Defining Survey Scope

Before using any sample surveys – or most critically, when creating surveys from scratch – it is important to be clear on precisely what the survey is intended to analyze. This in turn shapes what questions are invented, or what and how existing questions are customized.

The best way to achieve this is to first create a meta-list of the areas of inquiry the survey should explore. For example, let’s assume we want to assess the training needs of our customer service staff.  Even before looking at any pre-written surveys, we consider what we know of customer service operations and the nature of our business, and do a little brainstorming about topic areas to be addressed.  Perhaps we determine the employee survey should probe people’s knowledge of returns policies, their ability to deal with unsatisfied customers, and their judgment about when to escalate a problem to a higher tier of support.

Once this scope is defined, we might then expect to come up with a survey in three sections, with detailed questions in each of these subject areas.

We keep this in mind when evaluating existing surveys against our needs, or when creating questions for our own original assessment instrument. This ensures that the survey we use will be truly relevant to our requirements.

Training Needs Analysis Survey Samples

A well-done TNA survey can be lengthy. Rather than reproduce them here, the following links include a variety of examples in their entirety.  A link to a sample survey does not indicate endorsement of any associated products or services at that link.

IT Training: A Windows Office Suite self-assessment for computer users.

General Needs Assessment, Managerial and Office Skills

Common Business Needs:  Equal Opportunites, Sales, Health & Safety, more. Several samples online.

Skills Self-Assessment – portion of a larger TNA survey series.

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Deborah Teramis Christian is a freelance writer and former business consultant who writes on a variety of contemporary issues.