Budgeting with Credit Cards

Posted by Nick Niesen on October 29th, 2010

These days, with so much easy credit available it is very easy to let your finances and debts get a little out of hand. Pretty much every morning when you wake up and check your mail, you will be greeted by a plethora of junk mail advertisements seeking to entice you into signing up for a personal loan, a new credit card, a debt consolidation loan or some other similar form of credit. Then on the television the same ads will be targeted at you all day long. When you check your email they will be there, filling up your inbox, and pretty much every high street store you enter will be offering you their own store card.

Budgeting, and keeping all of these various expenses under control just gets more and more difficult with the more options there are available and the more things you have to keep track of. However, simple household budgeting is still a good option for anyone who wants to keep their debts under control. The basic principle of budgeting is that your expenditure matches your income. It does not necessarily mean that you spend less money and make a lot of cutbacks in your lifestyle, although this is frequently what it entails.

Budgeting is more concerned with giving you the control you need to keep track of your expenses. There are a couple of ways in which you can make a budget and stick to it if you have credit cards. Credit cards give you a number of payment options for your convenience. You can set up a direct debit between your credit card company and your bank and inform them either to pay off the full amount on your statement each month, pay off the minimum amount on the statement each month, or pay a fixed amount against your credit card each month.

Paying the fixed amount is a very convenient way of budgeting, as you will know exactly how much each month will go to your credit cards. You simply select a sum that you can afford each month and have the bank transfer that against your credit cards. The only downfall of this method is that there is no guarantee that you will spend less than the amount you repay each month. So for example, if you are paying two hundred pounds against your card each month, but spending more than this, you will be building up a large credit card debt for yourself that you will have to repay at some stage in the future.