BUDGETING

Budgeting is considered as the bedrock of financial planning. Whether you're aiming to sock some money away for a home purchase, plan a vacation, or simply balance your checkbook, working with a solid budget is key. But just what is budgeting, and how do you make a budget you can work with? This complete budget guide will provide you with everything you need to know about budgets: why they matter, the types of budgets, and how you can establish, maintain and live by a budget to improve your financial life.

What is Budgeting?

The process of budgeting is planning where and how you’ll be spending your money over a certain period usually, a month. It’s a method of keeping your income and expenses in line, ensuring you’re not spending more than you earn while putting money in savings and investing for future goals. A thoughtful budget enables you to manage your money, rather than allowing your money to manage you.

Why is Budgeting Important?

• Financial Management: A budget provides a snapshot of what you have and what you can afford, so you can make better financial choices.
• Savings and investments: It’s a useful way to ensure that you save money for future goals like retirement, a vacation or an emergency fund.
• Debt Avoidance: A budget keeps you from getting into unnecessary debt by knowing your limitations and working within them.
• Meeting Financial Targets: Budgeting serves as the cornerstone of financial planning, allowing you to determine how and when to allocate your money to meet long-term goals.

Types of Budgeting Methods

There are many popular budgeting methods, and each strategy offers a different type of approach based on your financial goals and habits. Here’s a look at a few of the most common:

    1- Zero-Based Budgeting

With zero-based budgeting, every dollar you earn has a home. With this method, you assign every dollar to categories like spending, saving, and investing until you drop to zero. This approach makes you meticulously think about what you spend and can reveal wasteful expenses. Here’s how it works:

• Begin with what you make in a month.
• Subtract all your expected expenses (rent, groceries, utilities, etc.).
• All the money left over goes into savings, investments, or discretionary spending, until you hit zero.

    2- 50/30/20 Rule

Meet the 50/30/20 budget, an easy-to-follow rule for divvying up your paycheck in three categories:

• 50 percent for basics: Rent, groceries and utilities.
• 30% for wants: This category includes discretionary spending, such as for dining out, entertainment or vacations.
• 20% for savings and debt: This chunk of your take-home pay is used to build your emergency fund, save and invest, or pay off debt.

This strategy is so popular because it’s simple to implement and you don’t have to track every single dollar. It strikes a nice balance between accommodating necessary expenditures and affording the flexibility to spend money on oneself.

   3- Envelope System

Envelope budgeting is a system for controlling your spending by putting a set amount of cash for various spending categories into separate envelopes. For instance, let’s say you decide you will spend $300 on groceries, so you put $300 cash in your “grocery” envelope. It also means that as soon as the cash is gone, you can’t spend any more from that category until the next month.

This can prevent you from overspending because you can spend up to the amount of cash you have stored in each spending category.

   4- Pay-Yourself-First Budgeting

In this approach, you pay for saving and investing before anything else. The second you get a paycheck, a predetermined chunk goes straight to savings or investment accounts, what’s left is what gets spent. This method will ensure that you achieve your financial goals before you can increase your lifestyle spend.

    5- Line-Item Budgeting

A line‐item budget is an account of your specific expenses. You write in all the spending categories you believe might possibly spend money on rent, insurance, groceries, utilities, going out, etc. and allocate a certain dollar amount for each category. Although this approach offers a great deal of control and transparency, it is time-consuming and can be arduous to manage.

Steps to Create a Budget

So, now that you’re acquainted with various budgeting techniques, let’s walk through how you can establish a budget of your own that’s tailored to your financial objectives and lifestyle.

   1- Take stock of your finances

Before drawing up a budget, knowing where you stand financially is essential. Begin by collecting all financial records, to include:

• Recent pay stubs
• Bank statements
• Credit card bills
• Loan statements

   2- Calculate Your Total Income

How much money are you getting each month? This includes:

• Salary (after taxes)
• Other income (freelance work, rental income, and so on.)
• All other regular sources of income

When your income is irregular, it may sound simple, but the best way to thing to do is to average out the past three to six months to calculate what you earn on average.

    3- List of Your Expenses

Start with making two lists, one for fixed costs and another for variable ones:

• Fixed costs are those that don’t vary from month to month, like rent, car payments and insurance.
• Variable spending changes from month to month, and can include items such as food, utilities, transportation and entertainment.

Also, don’t forget about the occasional expenses, like gifts, vacations and car maintenance.

  4- Determine Your Savings Goals

Before you start deciding how much money you should put into each category, it’s crucial to establish savings targets. These can include:

• Building an emergency fund
• Saving for a down payment on a house
• Saving for retirement
• If you are planning a vacation or adding to your big purchases

Setting objectives can help you determine what you should be saving each month and help to make your budget more focused.

     5- Choose a Budgeting Method

Choose the budget technique that works for you and your financial situation and habits. If this is new to you, the 50/30/20 rule is a simple way to go. If you want to have maximum control over every dollar, maybe zero-based budgeting is a good fit for you.

     6- Track Your Spending

With your budget developed, you can now begin to track your spending. You can track all this manually by writing down every expense or rely on apps that automatically categorize and track your spending. Tracking your spending will help you stay within that budget and adjust as necessary.

     7- Adjust as Needed

Your finances and your priorities may evolve over time, and your budget should do the same. Check in often on your budget and make changes if necessary to reduce spending, contribute more to savings or move money to other categories.

Thoughts on Staying in Your Budget

A budget may take some time to compile, but it’s the easy half of the personal finance game; sticking to one is, for most people, the difficult part. Here are some strategies to help you stay on track:

    1- Automate Savings

Autopilot: One of the simplest ways to make sure you meet your savings goals is to automate them. As soon as you get paid, set up automatic transfers to any savings or investment accounts you have so that you’re saving money without even thinking about it.

   2- Use Budgeting Apps

There’s no shortage of apps that can help you with budgeting, like Mint, YNAB (You Need a Budget), or Every Dollar. Many of these tools can keep a running tab on your spending and warn you when you’re approaching your limits.

    3- Cut Unnecessary Expenses

After tracking your spending for a couple of months, you might notice yourself falling into patterns of overspending. Look for categories you can trim back, like dining out, subscriptions or impulse buys, and devote that money to your emergency fund or reducing your debt.

   4- Set Realistic Goals

Realism with your budget is crucial. Setting overly ambitious goals such as slashing your spending in half overnight is more likely to discourage you or cause you to quit altogether. Start small and work toward bigger, more aggressive goals.

   5- Reward Yourself

Budgeting doesn’t have to be the death of all joy in life. Reward yourself with little things for following your budget like buying that something special or taking a weekend trip after you have met some savings goals.”

A Guide to Common Budgeting Errors and How to Avoid Them

Even those with the best intentions of budgeting can fall victim to errors that disrupt their designs. Here are a few budgeting pitfalls to beware of:

  1- Neglecting Irregular Expenses

Knowing about the budget for rent or groceries is easy, but don’t overlook more infrequent costs like annual insurance premiums, holiday gifts, or car repairs. Allocate a part of your monthly income to these irregular expenses, so they don’t shock your budget.

   2- Being Too Restrictive

It’s certainly important to curb your spending, but you can also take it too far and your efforts can blow up in your face. If you already feel as though you are depriving yourself, you’re more likely to overspend further down the line. Be sure to budget for some fun to keep the balance.

   3- Not Adjusting Over Time

Your finances are not constant, and your budget shouldn’t be, either. Do not forget to raise or lower your budget as your income rises or your spending habits change. Do not do so, and you may end up spending too much or missing out on ways to save.

   4- Ignoring Small Purchases

Those small expenses for coffee, snacks and app purchases can add up a lot over time. For these “little” costs, it is important to sort out and track even when you are just starting out.

Budgeting is one of the most powerful ways to establish financial stability and reach long-term objectives. How you choose to allocate your money is your own, whether you want to try the 50/30/20 rule, adopt a zero-based budget or settle on an entirely different method the point is to find something that works for you and adhere to it. Monitoring your spending, creating actionable goals and pivoting when you need to, will help you take the reins, managing your finances and creating for yourself a promising future.