The following article regarding budgeting was written by Bob Lotich, a personal finance expert. We have found the financial tips on his website to be both concise and helpful. We are in the process of creating a clearer picture of where our money goes each month (a budget), found this article on Bob’s site, and thought you would also find it helpful.
In Bob’s Words… The thing I regularly finding myself telling people is that budgeting is not necessarily a restrictive task. It isn’t all about telling yourself “NO” all the time. In fact, as Linda and I have become better at budgeting, we find that it allows us to tell ourselves “Yes” many times when our natural inclination would be to not do something.
For example, before we had a budget set up, all our money was in one big pot, so if we bought a new lamp for our living room, it meant that we were going to have less money for groceries, or to fill our gas tank up. As a result we never really made purchases like this. It just felt foolish to buy something we didn’t NEED when we weren’t sure we’d have enough money to cover the things we did need.
Interestingly, after creating our budgeting, and separating all those NEED-based expenses from the nice-to-have expenses, it really changed the game. Now we now budget money each month for house decorations. It is a pretty good feeling to be in the mall and see a picture that would go great in our bedroom and be able to say “Yes” knowing that it isn’t taking groceries off the table.
Now just to be clear, we do still have to tell ourselves “No” – if that picture was more than we had budgeted, we would tell ourselves “No” until we had saved enough for it. And to be honest, when we started budgeting, we didn’t really have enough money coming in to budget for a lot of “fun” things like that. It was mostly important stuff like bills.
The sacrifices are only temporary!
But it is important to remember that financial sacrifices you make are almost always temporary. Most of us get ourselves in financial messes and have to dig ourselves out of them. Once you are out of it, things are a bit easier to maintain.
It’s similar to losing weight: it is easy to gain weight, requires only a little effort to maintain your weight, and takes a lot of effort to lose weight. Financially, it is easy to get ourselves in debt, requires some effort to only spend what you earn, and it takes a lot of sacrifice to get out of debt.
If you want additional information regarding budgeting or personal finance from a Christian perspective you can follow this link back to the author’s website.http://christianpf.com/make-a-personal-budget/
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