When I learned what it meant to live a frugal lifestyle, the thing I struggled the most with was budgeting my money correctly. It was quite discouraging at first because it’s the most important thing to do when you begin living frugally. If you feel yourself not feeling confident about budgeting or you’re not sure where to start, hopefully this post will help you!
What is Budgeting?
Budgeting is creating an intentional plan for how you spend, save, and invest over a period of time. It’s to create a roadmap for your debt, savings, and financial goals while managing your income, reducing your waste spending, and prepping for emergencies when they occur.
There are many different ways to budget your money, but I will keep it simple for this post. If you want to learn more specific ways to budget, I recommend doing your own research. There are a lot of resources available online that helped me and I’m sure they will help you as well!
How to Get Started with Budgeting
The very first thing to do is find your financial goals. Do you want to lower your debt? Add more to your savings? Save for future vacations? All of those are great goals to have and act as great motivators to get you started.
Once you have your goals defined, its time to actually punch in some numbers. The best thing that I’ve done was get all my debt in a list along with my bills, then my income. From there, you should subtract your debts/bills for how long you get your paycheck (whether its weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc). For me, I get paid bi-weekly so I added my debt and bills for that period and subtracted my income from that. Then I took whatever income that was left and determined how much I could put in savings. I wanted a consistent amount coming out of my account, but a dollar amount didn’t work for me so I settled for 3% to start. As I work down my debt, I plan to add a higher percentage.
Where Should I Track My Budget?
I found it easiest to track my budgeting in a planner. It let me see the month as a whole and broke it down into weeks. However, there is a more automated way in Excel or Google Sheets, if you’re savvy with technology. I’ve also seen a lot of debt trackers and specially made trackers, which I will be adding on here soon!
Just Remember
Budgeting is a marathon, not a sprint. It can be difficult for someone to start, but it’s so worth it in the long run. Just remember to be kind to yourself, work up your savings, and meet your goals slowly. Don’t feel like you have to work overtime or beat yourself up if you don’t meet a goal for a week. The best thing to do is move forward and keep working to chip away at your debt and pay your bills. You got this!