How many of us work off of budgets?
Who was taught budgeting in school?
This is a fundamental and essential principle to both short and long term living.
It’s so easy to just throw things on a credit card and instantly be gratified.
Here are some money budgeting tips that Gary Keller Recommends:
- Lead with revenue
- Play red light green light
- Stick to the budget.
In other words
- make money before you spend it. It’s that simple. Going into high interest debt for a fun car or this or that may be the worst money thing we can do to ourselves. It’ll be extremely difficult to get out of the rat race if we live like that
- When costs start adding up (by spending more then you’re making), pull out the stop sign and start evaluating that expense and all the other expenses – fixed and unfixed.
- The budget needs to be respected, she’s there for a reason – to guide you throughout life financially.
Of course, it’s nice to talk about theory and another to practice practicality.
Start somewhere to get a hold of your finances. It’s like anything, at first there will be resistance and as time goes on it’ll become a habit and you couldn’t see yourself not doing it.
We went into bad debt before, about 15,000$ in credit cards and then dedicated 30% of our income to get out of bad debt and put it towards our lowest balance due so we could wipe that minimum payment out entirely. We promised ourselves we will never go back into bad (read high interest rate) debt.
How ever much debt you have you could do this too, it may be a grind but it’ll be worth it.
We then got more financially literate through this process. We became aware of our fixed expenses, and budgeted for unfixed expenses.
We now review our budgets on a weekly basis via google sheets.
Sticking to the budget requires self discipline – some months are better than others.
Awareness is key because if we don’t know what we don’t know – how can we change?
Joe DiAndrea 