One of the first things you should do in repairing your credit is get a handle on your existing financial situation.  Normally the repair process involves negotiations with your various debtors to arrive at an amount you can reasonably pay each month.  Again, this process normally involves multiple debtors, so before you get started you are going to need to know how much money you need to live on (rent, food, utilities, and gasoline, etc...).  In order to accomplish that objective, you are going to have to create a budget and plan.

The problem with most budget systems and programs is that although they create the budgets, they are often hard to maintain.  Some budgeting programs only produce reports for you to use as a guide.  Unfortunately, reports and printed material need to be updated every time there is a change in your finances.  Emergencies and other unexpected life situations can easily "blow" or take the budget off track.  Once off track, you would typically have to manually re-compute your options to get back on track; more than often this is a tedious task.

Living Budget Pro was designed from the ground up as a financial planning and management tool.  Living Budget Pro actually creates and manages living budgets.  Basically, a Living Budget® is a method of displaying your finances in a contextual, editable format where you can easily see the potential of earnings.  Living budgets are designed to be easily created and maintained.  Beyond that, living budgets provide the kind of visibility that business normally rely upon.  Businesses however, normally have teams of accountants creating complex spreadsheets to express their specific needs.  Living Budget Pro is not a spreadsheet, or spreadsheet program.  Living Budget Pro is fully functional Windows© based program that automatically builds and maintains your living budget. 

With Living Budget Pro the first thing you need to do is create the budget.  Living Budget Pro provides two ways to create your living budget; (1) you can easily import a CSV (comma, separated values) file, which contains all your income and debt sources.  Or (2) you can use Living Budget Pro's budget creation wizard which will ask questions and provides a means for you to enter in all the required information.  Once complete Living Budget Pro creates a calendar year's worth of transactions based on your income and debt sources and builds a budget based on your pay-periods.  All income and expense entries as shown on the workspace are really transactions held in the system database.

Once Living Budget Pro has created your living budget, you can flip over to December and view the ending balance which represents your financial potential.  Backing up a little, the basis or foundation of your living budget should be your necessities (rent, food, utilities, gasoline, etc...).  December's ending balance will now represent the available monies that can be devoted to paying down debt.

Living Budget Pro makes it easy to create, edit, or delete payees (income and debt sources) and individual transactions.  With a few mouse clicks you can change the amount of a bill (maybe your credit card), and that change will be reflected in every pay-period of your living budget.  You will immediately see how that change affected your overall budget.  Since it is so easy to make changes in Living Budget Pro, you will be able to easily create many what-if scenarios and tailor a budget that meets your specific requirements.

Living Budget Pro also incorporates our "Budget Squeeze" tool, that will analyze your living budget and find all available monies.  As we discussed previously, December's ending balance represents monies that can be used to pay down debt.  Well, the Budget Squeeze tool will display the maximum amount of money available in each pay-period for the entire calendar year.  These pay-period amounts will not cause any amounts in subsequent pay-periods to fall below zero.  Budget Squeeze will then provide a means for you to select an existing or new payee, and enter an amount which can be spread across the entire year.  While in the Budget Squeeze tool, you can add or delete prospective debt sources in an effort to allocate the monies in a fashion that best meets your situation.  Once complete, Budget Squeeze will create transactions for all your entries in the main workspace.