10 Ways to Set up a Home Office without Blowing Your Budget 1. Look for rebates on basic office supplies. Check sales circulars for special offers and rebates on items you will use all the time. 2. Sign up for customer loyalty programs at office supply stores. Many offer bonus points for initial purchases, and you ... Are You Serious About Your Telecom Budget? If you find it hard to believe that an audit can make a big difference in your telecom budget then chances are you haven't given a telecom auditor the opportunity to review your bills (not a sales person whose main concern is to sell you ... Maximizing Your Advertising Budget Trying to communicate your company's message can be quite difficult if you're working with a limited advertising budget. One of the biggest problems with having a small budget is that reaching your audience becomes more challenging since you may have ...
How To Stick To Your Budget
I've had a lot of people tell me that setting up their budget was simple but when it came to living by it payday after payday they admitted losing interest in a very short time.
Let's face it. The day to day drudgery of trying to figure out how to best spend your money isn't the most interesting aspect of our lives.
Let me see if I can make the budget process a little more appealing to you. I don't have any magic or secret process to tell you about but I do have a method that will show you why a budget doesn't have to be boring.
I can do this with one word. GOALS
When we think of goals most of us look far into the future to our retirement. That's the problem. It's hard to imagine when your 20 what you will need when you are 65.
Accomplishing your goals doesn't have to take a lifetime. Even when they do you can set milestones along the way to break it up and get a sense of accomplishment much earlier.
If you have problems staying on a budget try setting some short term goals. We can start with an easy one. Try to save $100 without missing it.
Unless you have no income at all this is easy. Don't spend any coins for any reason. If you buy something for 25 cents break a dollar. Then all you have to do is put the change out of your pocket or purse in a jar every day.
This sounds simple enough and you've probably heard about saving change before. If you are a skeptic like I was you probably think that this isn't going to lead to any real savings at all.
Let's get back to that $100 I was talking about. How long do you think it would take you to save enough change to equal $100. 6 months? 1 year?
The fact is that the average person can save $100 in less than three months. In some cases even sooner. That's not very long to accomplish a goal.
Now let's look at setting milestones using the same method. Roll your change once a month to see how close you are to your goal. Write down how much you saved that month on a piece of paper and put that and your rolled change back in the jar. Keep doing this until you've reached your $100 goal.
Now, what do you do with that $100? You could put it in a savings account and earn a little interest but it still wouldn't be worth much more than $100 even after a year.
My suggestion would be to pay it on one of your credit cards. That way you could turn that $100 into much more with the interest you would save.
It may sound like I strayed from the topic of this article by talking about saving your change. Actually a budget is just a system of reaching goals. You do this by working backwards. You decide what it is you want to do and then make all of your money decisions based on that end.
Setting up and maintaining a budget is going to take organization and discipline. This task will be much easier if you are working toward something you really want.
To learn more about Budgets you can visit The Complete Budget and Bill Organizer http://www.homemoneyhelp.com/BBOonline.html to find Budget Stretcher's free budget system complete with all of the forms and worksheets.
About the Author Terry Rigg is the author of Living Within Your Means - The Easy Way http://www.homemoneyhelp.com/ebookadpage.html and editor of The FREE Budget Stretcher Newsletter and Budget Stretcher web site http://www.homemoneyhelp.com. He has 25 years of experience counseling individuals and families concerning their personal finances. Use this email link to get a list of all of Terry's articles by autoresponder at: mailto:articlelist@budgetstretcherpremium.com
Budgeting News
Budgeting for Healthcare in Retirement U.S. News & World Report By David Francis Many Americans assume that Medicare, the government-backed health-insurance program, will cover the majority of their heathcare costs after they stop working. But according to a new report from Fidelity, a 65-year-old couple that plans ...
Council still 'budgeting in the dark' Independent Online However, it appears that Durban shares, with other South African city governments, a propensity to keep budgeting processes largely within the corridors of municipal buildings. This is disturbing in a context where the world is seeing major shifts in ...
Executive Director, Finance and Budgeting Orlando Business Journal Seminole County Public Schools is recruiting and evaluating candidates for the position of Executive Director, Finance and Budgeting. This individual will have responsibility for managing the entire financial function of this leading Florida school ...
A nudge toward budgeting McKnight's Long Term Care News For much of my life, I adopted a fairly casual attitude towards budgets and money. I believed in working hard and knew that money mattered; I just took a “God (or my parents) will provide” approach. It turns out that becoming an adult involves ...
