Tips for budgeting

mint.com

Set some attainable savings goals.

Then work hard to live off the rest.


THat's what I do. I then adjust how much I attribute to budget categories as I gain more first hand experience on how I want to live my life and what I purchase more frequently.

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The only way I can think to do it with discretionary spending is to take out a weekly sum of cash and say if it runs out it runs out.

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This is what I do. I get paid once a month, and immediately pay all my bills off (and put 15% in savings). Then, I have X amount of money left over for food and discretionary spending for the next 30 days.

I use mint.com to track my budget month to month. I input the numbers from mint, categorical income/taxes from pay stubs and balances of my accounts into a yearly spreadsheet to see how I'm doing for the year, and how I can expect things to go. I can change my expected month-to-month figures in any given category to see where I'll be at on my transaction accounts, how my overall holdings will be affected, and whether I'll have room to funnel more into my investment accounts.

I find this helps to give me more perspective than mint offers by itself, while mint is perfect for tracking my spending during the month. I find that it's important to keep your figures reasonable - based on your past values over several months to a year - or else you'll exceed your expected spending so frequently and naturally that you stop giving a shite about the budget.

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Im a data lover. No way i could do 4 categories.

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Me too, but it seemed too much for me. I condensed mine down to see how it goes.

Also, having sporadic income is annoying with mint. Once it's stable, I should be able to hammer down a solid budget.

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Or transfer it to another account that you've got a debit card with.

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That's what we do. We have several accounts with one bank and money does not commingle from account to account.

For my personal budget, I put all of my monthly bills (cable, utility, rent/mortgage, insurance) in a checking account and have them drafted electronically. For car repairs, tires, clothing, and food, I use cash in an envelope system. I also budget $100-$150 month for "blow" money, or money I'm gonna impulse spend and put that in an envelope as well. When I have leftover cash, it goes to saving for toys/vacation/ new car. Everthing that doesn't go into an envelope or into checking for bills is either donated, invested or saved for xmas and birthday gifts.

I need some mint.com. I created the account several months ago. It had trouble categorizing my purchases properly. After an hour of setting categories I got fed up.

The biggest culprit is when my wife shops for groceries at Walmart.