Let me introduce myself, my name is Sarah G, Mother, Business Woman, single mum and out of sheer necessity Budgeter Extraordinaire!
But it wasn’t always so. About 10 years ago I found myself in a bit of a financial mess; I had very little money coming in and loads of money going out. All I ever felt was stress. I couldn’t keep track of it all. And it seemed I was doing nothing but killing tree’s making list after list after list of bills, crossing things out and re-writing them until I couldn’t even understand what I had written.
Lucky for me I had a superbrained brother-in-law who happens to be as luck would have it, a finance guy, an economist to be exact. Many a family joke was shared at my brother in-laws expense, I mean, how is it possible that one person can have so many spreadsheets. I am not joking, he literally had a spreadsheet for everything, from comparing the price of groceries between supermarkets so he knew where to shop that week, to how many calories he had consumed and exercise he had performed to calculate his future expected body mass index! Scary but true.
Naturally he could not understand the difficulties I had keeping track of my own finances. “Why don’t you just put it all in a spreadsheet” he suggested. You must be joking I thought, what would I know about spreadsheet, talk about too hard basket! But finally, out of sheer desperation I agreed to at least have a look. We went into his office and he opened one up. Whoa! Talk about high tech gadgets, there’s no way I could do that I thought.
Well, I thought wrong. He sat me down and showed me one simple thing.
Put the amounts in here……click that weird Greek symbol there……and VOILA! Hey presto! It’s all worked out for you…..AND……..If you need to change anything, just change one thing, and VOILA! Hey Presto! All the other stuff changes automatically, amazing!
From that moment on I was hooked. And since then I have honed my spreadsheeting skills to be able to do some pretty swish stuff, from profit and loss statements, to sales presentations, to pie graphs, 3D bar graphs…you name it, I can do it. And if I can’t, I bet I can figure it out with a little perseverance and a few phone calls to my personal spreadsheet guru Paul.
You might be wondering, did I have any other formal training? The answer is no. Did I complete a University degree? No. What about computer programming skills? No way.
What I did have was a complicated family budget and a desire to do something about it to make my life easier. I just had to stop spending hours of my precious time making lists. Waste of paper, waste of time, waste of brain space, I really had better things to do.
So may I say thankyou for being here looking at my BudgetMum system, and if you decide to purchase a copy, I thank you in advance. I hope you enjoy the learning process, and congratulations on taking the first step towards a very rewarding result.
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