Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
When you start your budget, it's going to be a little stressful and you're going to see where you
really need to save the money,
that you're looking at that cell phone,
and maybe you don't need the email on your cell phone... cut that back
and, if you've looked at, eating out and you're eating out four, five times a week, you need to cut that back to maybe
two or three times.
It's not cutting out all of the luxuries in life,
but it's just cutting back those luxuries.
One of the things, one of the important things about a budget is tracking
what you spend.
And, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Certainly it's not, because it involves
detail record-keeping,
but even the smallest things.. the minutiae, in your budget,
can sneak up on you later,
and then you're asking the age old question, "where did the money go?"
Well, you know, the devil is in the details and it's right there in all the
expenses that you have
every month everyday every week
and you have to stay on top of the budget regularly.
One perfect example of that is
the cup of coffee, the daily cup of coffee.
Just about everybody's guilty of this, they go to the coffee shop each day, and they get that
three dollar and fifty cent cup of coffee. Well, after twelve months
of doing that day after day after day.
that three dollars and fifty cents adds up to over twelve hundred dollars for
the year. That's a big chunk of change
and... I don't know about you, but, you know, it if you look at the twelve
hundred dollars versus a cup of coffee think I'd rather have the twelve hundred
dollars in savings. I think that
that makes me feel a bit better.
Once you've tracked your budget
and you've seen where your money is going, you want to set goals for yourself.
And you might have a small goal at first, maybe having two hundred dollars
in your savings.
You can set yourself with a larger goal: you'd like to make an extra house payment or
extra car payment
uh... you want to have - start a college fund for your children.
So it's setting your goals that you know that your be going to be able to do and it's
kind of you, you can pat yourself on the back when you've made your goal.