合理理财 以应对经济危机

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Keep your financial house in order by tracking where your money is going. Here is how you can build your family budget.

First, keep a money journal for a month. This means you write down exactly what you spend on a daily basis, from your morning coffee to your cable bill. Get in touch with where you’re spending your money. You may be surprised how much you spent, make sure you know exactly where your money is going.

Next, figure out where you should be allocating your money in an ideal world. Check out this pie chart, Housing, Utilities and Insurance should be 40% of your spending. Living Expenses, that is food clothing and medicine 25%, Transportation 15%, and that's everything, gas and your monthly, um, bill, savings 5%, debt 5%, Education and child care to be 6%, recreation 4%.

And of course your situation will vary. These are just guidelines on what your budget should look like. So, how do you go about tracking your expenses and allocating that money? One idea here is to go online, track your income and your outgo. Websites like cnnMoney can help or software like Quicken.com can help you organize yourself when it comes to your savings and your spending. Currently Quicken has a free online version where you can track all of your money on one page where you can see your retirement and checking accounts all at one time. What’s more, the program will calculate where your money is being spent and how your progressing towards goals and even get alerts if your balance is low.

I'm Gerri Willis for cnnMoney.

Vocabulary:

1.       financial house: 金融商行（这里用作比喻）

2.       money journal: 花费记账簿

3.       allocate: To set apart for a special purpose分配

4.       pie chart: a circle divided into parts by lines coming from the centre to show how big the different parts of a total amount are饼形统计图

5.       utility: a service such as gas or electricity provided for people to use

6.       outgo: Something that goes out, especially an expenditure or a cost花费或支出

7.       balance: Something that is left over账户中的余额