Building a budget is very important if you want to get out of debt. You can get out of debt without going to some expensive company and paying them to try to help you. It does not matter if you are in $100 of debt or $1,000,000 of debt you can get yourself out with a little bit of work.

The first thing you should do is start saving every receipt for every purchase you make from the beginning of a month until the end. You can get an envelope to save the receipts in so that you will not lose any of them. They will be a very important part of setting up your budget.

Next you should take those receipts and put them into a budgeting application. Money Tree has some excellent software for the price or an Excell spreadsheet will work good if you are a do it yourselfer. You should come up with catagories to put all of your expenses under; for example, food expense, electricity expense, entertainment expense, etc..

You may have to itemize some of your receipts if it is for a place such as Walmart where multiple things can be purchased. You may have to put them in more than one catagory.

Add up all of the expenses in each catagory. This should give you a pretty good idea on where your money is going. That is the biggest part on building a budget. You will need to find out where your money is going.

When you figure out where your money is going you will be able to cut out some of those unncessary expenses that you have been incurring each month.

Perhaps the most important two parts of building a budget are saving all of your receipts and having a good budgeting software.