Skip to main content

Live within your means

Many today are spending more than their savings, and steadily going deeper into debt as a result. This is an easy and common pattern to fall into, and one that requires some planning and discipline to reverse.
The first step is creating a budget. As unpleasant as this may sound, creating a budget is nothing more than examining your income and expenditures in order to determine exactly how much money you have coming in and where you’re spending that money.
Once you’ve got a clear understanding of your current budget, your challenge is to find places where you can spend less (or earn more) in order to achieve your financial goals. Here are some steps you can take toward that end:
1. Question Your Needs And Wants
What do you want? What do you really need? Evaluate your current financial situation. Take a look at the big picture. Make two lists – one for needs and one for wants. As you make the list, ask yourself:
   Why do I want it?
    How would things be different if I had it?
    What other things would change if I had it? (for better or worse)
    Which things are truly important to me?
    Does this match my values?
2. Set Guidelines
We all have different budgets based on our needs and wants. But the Building a Budget chart on the next page shows some guidelines on how much should go toward different expenses. You may need to make adjustments for a daily latte fix or visits to family, but remember to subtract amounts from other areas if you do.
3. Track, Trim And Target
Once you start tracking, you may be surprised to find you spend hundreds of dollars a month on eating out or other flexible expenses. Some of these are easily trimmed. Cutting back is usually a better place to start than completely cutting out. Be realistic. It will help you to be better prepared for unexpected costs.
The SMART Way to Trim Expenses
In finding ways to trim flexible expenses, it helps to have a goal to save toward each month. Setting such a goal needs to be SMART:
Specific: Smart goals are specific enough to suggest action. Example: Save enough to visit Rome for your wedding anniversary. Not just “save money.”
Measurable: You need to know when you achieved your goal or how close you are. Example: A trip to Italy costs $2,000, and you have $800 saved.
Attainable: The steps toward reaching your goal need to be reasonable and possible. Example: I know I can save enough money each week to purchase that trip to Italy.
Relevant: The goal needs to make sense. You don’t want to work toward a goal that doesn’t fit your need. Example: We would like to stay in four-star hotels in celebration of our anniversary.
Time-Related: Set a definite target date. Example: I want to go to Italy by next summer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dangerous sex Positions For Men

The most common cause of pénile injury is found among the variety of potentially dangerous positions used for séxual intercourse. The most popular is the ‘woman-on-top’. This type of position can result in an impact between the pénis against the female pelvis or perineum that can easily traumatize the pénile cylinders. A pénis becomes érect when the lining of the cylinder within it is engorged with blood.  A pénis fracture can occur when there is trauma to the eréct pénis, resulting in a rupture of the cylinder lining. This very painful injury is often accompanied by an abrupt, distressing cracking noise that is immediately followed by dark bruising of the pénis due to blood escaping the cylinder. In ten to 30% of pénis fractures, the urethra is damaged and blood may be visible at the urinary opening. Given these signs, an injury should be relatively simple to diagnose, right? You would be surprised, even with the unsettling sounds of a fracture occurring, many men...
Post a Comment
Read more

AWS Battles Rivals: Advertising Campaign

Amazon Web Services has defeated IBM in a competition for lucrative federal contracts, threatened Microsoft's core businesses, and reshaped corporate technology. In the last few months, the pioneering cloud-computing unit of the online retail giant has taken a page from the playbook of some of its more traditional competitors: It started advertising. Ads have been splashed across billboards and in airport terminals, television spots and web videos, featuring a whiteboard full of sketches of software architecture and appeals to invent something using Amazon's collection of rented computing services. The advertising campaign, which bears the "Build On" tagline, represents a milestone in AWS' march from technology upstart to one of the major players in business software, technologists and marketers say. For many years, AWS didn't advertise, partly because it didn't have to. The service held a wide lead over the competition, and word-of-mouth was enough to...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's real and cool, no scam involve.

Beat Bad Breath naturally!   Breathing nauseating odor from mouth makes isolate you from the goodies of societies. It is a state when you are not wanted to utter even a single word or breathe publicly. Bad breath is a result of many a factor such as dentures, cavities, throat infection, alcohol, smoking, lung infection, anything from food to poor oral hygiene. Thanks to some the natural home remedies that prove immensely helpful in getting rid of bad breathe. Following are some helpful tips to overcome bad breath. 1. The first and foremost thing to be bear in mind is dont forget to brush your teeth after every meal. 2. Sweeten your breath by chewing up a few cardamom seeds. The aromatic flavor in cardamom freshens up your breath. 3. Often drink one glass of lemon juice with little salt and sugar. 4. Chew up some leaves of Parsley for fresh breath. 5. Tea made from Fenugreek (methi) seeds also helps relieve of bad odor and bad breath. 6. Before going to bed, rinse your mouth ...
Post a Comment
Read more