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Budgeting

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In a nutshell

You need to plan. It starts with goals, short-term goals and long-term goals. Then you develop your budget. Be realistic with yourself about what the cost of your present life is and what the cost of your future life will be. Learn to budget to free up money for savings, if you plan to save towards longer term goals, learn how to invest your money to make it work for you, which is how you begin to build wealth.

Learn more detailed Financial Planning Steps

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Creating Your Budget

A budget is a plan you create in order to balance your finances. Effective budgeting works with your income to ensure that you have reasonable funds to pay fixed bills, purchase variable items, and to save towards your goals in the near and distant future.

Budgeting is an essential life skill. Whatever income class one lives in, anyone can wastefully burn through money if little or no care is applied to the management of it, and mismanagement of money can cause problems in anyone's life. If you're reading this because you have been struggling with your own budgeting, the good news is that learning to budget properly will make a tremendous improvement in your quality of life.

Money stress is a horrible thing to live with, proper budgeting brings order in meaningful ways to people's lives and makes realistic dreams and goals attainable.

We need to spend money in the short-term and we should save for the long-term. It doesn't come naturally for many of us to intuitively find a balance between short-term spending and longer term saving, but to get our finances in order we need to see clearly what our actual expenses and spending habits are. We should prepare for the future and emergencies. When we develop the habit of effective budgeting we can work towards building up savings, avoid debt, and reach important goals that improve the quality of our lives.

A well-run budget will help you:

  1. Ensure that necessary expenses are paid for
  2. Pay off old debt and prevent new bad debts
  3. Allocate reasonable funds to purchase variable items within your means
  4. Learn wise shopping and get the most from your funds
  5. Build savings for emergencies - avoid financial chaos
  6. Plan and save for short and long-term goals
  7. Have peace of mind that your finances are under control

Budget to Save

To us, all budgeting should lead to building up savings: for emergencies, for short term goals and for long term goals. We strongly believe that living within our means--while difficult to do in today's consumerist culture--is something everyone should do for the sake of quality of life. Money stress is the worst, and it can be avoided by maintaining adequate earnings, effective budgeting, avoiding bad debt, and SAVING. When we say budgeting, we also mean saving, because SAVINGS MAKE SENSE.

Get Started on Your Budget Plan

Getting a budget plan going properly involves 7 Steps:

  1. Choose a Tracking System / Budgeting Program
  2. Calculate Income
  3. Calculate and Categorize Expenses
  4. Set Goals
  5. Allocation
  6. Update Regularly, Make It a Habit
  7. Follow It Through

To understand these steps more clearly, we've explained them further in our Guide To Setting up Your Budget in 7 Steps HERE

Things to consider for Budgeting Success 

If you'd like to jump right into working on your own budget plan now then +++link to subscribe to YBP budget+++