Budgeting is a very crucial part of your finances that will either break you or make you survive into another month. I have a very unpopular belief that says, if we take away the inflation issue, take away the wage issue and wage theft problem in America. I do believe that a lot of people are just simply bad with money.
And I’m no bank-level financial advisor or anything. I’ve been able to sustain all of my expenses without a hitch. I’ve paid my monthly loans on time, actually, pretty well in advance we’ll say because as soon as I see bills come up infront of me, I want them out of my face as soon as possible.
I always advise people when they’re out on their own and that’s to watch their numbers. Always total the amount you’ll be paid by the month, if it’s fixed income. Then, take all of the expenses you’re paying for by the month and total them up. Then, subtract the amount of your expenses from the total earning and you’ll figure how much you’ve got left to work with and how you’ll spend it if you want to. Saving is also key.
I’m not here to tell you what to do with your money. People get vehemently defensive when you point out the flaws of their spending habits, always treating it as a control issue when you’re just simply finding what’s wrong with it as they complain all of the time as to why they’re broke.
But all I will say in regards to that, is that, you really need to weigh your needs from your wants. Impulsivity is a bad driver in how it ruins our finances. I’ve done things where I’d be in a store and I’d take something I thought I’d really want to have and I’d carry it around for a while. Eventually over time, the feeling of wanting that thing, washes away because I know that it is simply an impulse issue.
I do get concerned when people lay out their budget plans. They spend triple the amount of groceries for just themselves. They actually even make budgets for bad money sinks like weed and alcohol. They never save anything, it’s always spending by the paycheck. You’ll never know if something will come up that’ll require a specific amount of money and you’ll find yourself in a tough situation where you are having to decide whether you want the lights on for another month or your car tire needs to be replaced because you’ve neglected it for so long that the threads are worn.
To this end, for some it might be helpful to start with tracking spending (speaking from personal experience). I couldn’t determine what was a reasonable amount for a given category for a budget because I didn’t see my current circumstance.
I spent several years categorizing my expenses into two broad categories: fixed vs variable.
Fixed costs are utilities, mortgages, grocery, and insurance etc, variable costs were anything else (more or less).
By doing it this way I could see the minimum I needed to live—and also how much I was spending on frivolous shit.
Use Google Docs, and make a simple spreadsheet to track numbers. It doesn’t have to be a beautiful sheet, just functional. It will grow with you over time as you add and remove functionally to track different aspects of your finances that are important to you. If you don’t know how to use spreadsheets, online MOOCs have courses for a tiny amount of dollars relative to what you learn.