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.
You need to make a vertical list (ideally in a spreadsheet but paper is fine) of all your expenses that you can recall. Keep adding to this as your life progresses and you spend money on something not previously on it.
Add a vertical column and put the amount of that expense there.
Next to each item on the list note the expense frequency (monthly, daily, bi-weekly, etc…). Now, ask yourself how often do you get paid? Daily, Weekly, Bi-weekly…?
The next column over you need to convert any expenses with a frequency that isn’t the same as your income frequency (Daily, Weekly, Bi-weekly). The way I do this is to multiply the expense amount by the number of times in a year you’d have to pay this to get the annual value for that expense. Then, divide by your income frequency/year to get it to match.
For example: Lets say you are paid weekly. You need to convert monthly rent of $1000 to weekly in order to match your income rate. To do this multiply rent x 12 (12 months/year) = $12000/year. Divide by 52 weeks in a year = 12000/52 means you pay ~$231/week (round up to the dollar) for rent.
Once you have done this calculation for all the expenses that don’t match your income rate you can now add all the matching values and compare this total to your TAKE HOME paycheck as it all matches. If your expenses are greater than your take home pay you need to cut back on things immediately. If you make more than you pay out then you can start adding ‘savings’ to your expenses list for things like emergencies, large 1 time purchases, and retirement.
There are many, many ways to get stupidly pedantic about how the math is done. This was written to keep things as simple as possible in the hopes of reaching the most amount of people that could use it.
Edit: for expenses that are unpredictable (groceries, entertainment) you need to ballpark an approximate value. Conveniently, these type of expenses are often the easiest to control or over-budget if you can.
Edit edit: February is the only month where you need to be careful as it has the least # of full weeks in it which means monthly expenses can surprise you. Keep this in mind realizing that if you start budgeting today by the time next February comes around you should have plenty of savings to cover the 1x shortfall.