Monday
It’s Monday – a painful day for most people, yours truly included. Sometimes it is made even more painful as we remember just how much money we ended up spending over the weekend.
Budget
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One word that can make people cringe, angry, and sad all at the same time; a rare occurrence indeed. There are plenty of reasons for this – people are told at work that their budgets are being cut, their ideas cannot be funded because they are not in the budget, and in our personal life our budgets usually quite match up to our desires.
I understand, like I always say I do not live in an ivory tower – I live in the real world.
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Investing requires capital (money), so if you don’t have money to invest how can you get started? I humbly present a few tools you can use to help construct your own personal budget…don’t cringe, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Below are a few tips and tricks that have helped me track my costs better, which is a good thing! Because outside of getting a big raise at work; which might certainly happen, a good place to start is to examine where your money is going.
•Figure out what your “base” costs are – rent, utilities, phone, groceries
You can estimate, but it’s better to actually look at the bills
Put together what your weekly “discretionary” items are – happy hours, movies, dinners with friends
Be honest, no one is seeing this but you
Examine what your “normal” daily costs are – coffee in the morning, a pretzel at the mall on your lunch break, etc
Again, no one is seeing this but you
If requested, I will do “Budget Mondays” every week, where I will strive to give more tips or tools to help with this oftentimes difficult process. We can discuss and work on this together – let me know!
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-apps-to-manage-money-2013-7
