Smart Budgeting Tips
| January 25, 2012 | Filled under Budgeting |
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Wouldn’t it be nice if we all just enjoyed doing the things that were good for us? We’d dream about buying a budgeting program for the computer, and sitting for hours at it fascinated at how it helped us keep tabs on all our expenses. We would cut everything wasteful to a minimum. We would tell our friends about all the great ways we cut our expenses, too. The software companies would even make fancy budgeting programs with 3-D effects the way videogame makers do it.
Well, seeing that good sense is never going to appeal to people all that much, these budgeting tips will have to do instead.
So let’s look at why we really do hate budgeting our expenses.
To begin with, most kinds of budgeting will suffer unless you’re willing to keep meticulous records of every move you make. Most people feel that it’s a waste of time to keep track of their expenses (or to keep track of the calories in the foods they eat too for that matter). Let the first one go, and you end up in the poorhouse. Let the other one go, and you land up fat.
People also a grudge every minute they spend on budgeting anything. Who wants to spend hours every week doing this kind of work, only to be shown over and over again how you’re not making enough, how you belong firmly down here on Earth and not up there in the stratosphere?
Well, good points all. But if you use the right budgeting tips, there are workarounds. For instance, the feeling of utter failure each time you sit at your budgeting program can be easily helped if you would just shoot for smaller goals that could help you feel like you’ve accomplished something. For instance, don’t set yourself up to budget for every single expense.
Instead, budget for all the noticeable ones – the expensive television, the expensive phone so on. You need to plan for these, find a way to save for them and only buy them when you have succeeded in putting enough money together.
Sitting in front of your big-screen TV can feel especially sweet when you know you’ve been responsible in how you’ve bought it. This kind of budgeting success can easily encourage you to take it further – to the smaller things. And to bigger things like buying a house, too.
Budgeting tips go wrong usually by getting all self-serious. There are lots of totally responsible people though who do a very good job with nothing more than a sheet of paper and pencil. You, personally, could do it with something fun like an envelope system. This is a fun little unscientific method where you just budget for all your essentials by setting up envelopes for each kind of expense.
You set up an envelope for your groceries, one for entertainment, one for clothing purchases, one for the utilities and so on. You need to be really honest though. Once an envelope is empty, you aren’t allowed to spend on that anymore. If the envelope system seems awfully quaint, you can use an online tool called Mvelopes just the same.
