Friends, lets get real for a moment.
"Financial responsibility", words to be loathed, dreaded, and possibly pelted with rotten vegetables. But like dentist appointments, oil changes, and college football, if we go too long without them, life can fall into disarray.
Hearing the cry of my people, I have made many improvements to myBudget. A new website, completely improved interface, and hopefully, an answer to your overspending, underspending, and otherwise erratic budget management.
But HOW?
Any tool is only effective if properly used. myBudget is only a instrument that is part of a greater process. If you don't commit to budget reform, myBudget won't help. Below is a how and why on easy budget reform with myBudget.
First thing is first, do an autopsy on your old spending habits. Take your past couple of bank statements, then review them to create broad budget types, such as Groceries, Gas, Bills, and Fun. You need to know how much is going in to each of these budget types, and then decide, is that where "x" dollars should be?
Next, take your total monthly take-home amount, start to portion out the budget types until you have a firm monthly dollar amount associated with each separate budget type. You should end up with something similar to the example below:
- Total take-home: $3000.00
- Groceries: $300.00
- Bills: $400.00
- House Payment: $1000.00
- Retail: $200.00
- Gas: $200.00
- Going Out: $200.00
- Investments: $300.00
- Donations: $400.00
Notice that for each family, distribution will be different. If you love to eat out, go for it, set a high budget for that type of thing. It's flexible and if after a month you see that you've poorly proportioned, change it!
The most wonderful thing about a healthy and successful budget is that, unlike its perception, it is truly freeing. Freedom with a budget?! Witchcraft! Heresy! But I kid you not friends, seeing that you've underspent on a particular budget type at the end of the month, it's like a little slice of Christmas Morning every month of the year.
2 comments:
Question. Is it compatible with a Mac?
Answer. No.
Lengthy and perhaps more meaningful answer. When you can access myBudget through a browser, then yes, but that may come soon or maybe later. I suppose if there was enough demand, I could make a dashboard widget, but honestly I think since Leopard came out, there is less interest in dashboard widgets.
Theres always Parallels and BootCamp
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