Tip 2. Keep it Simple
How to Budget Money: Keep It Simple and Succeed
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Learn to keep your home budget simple.
Then you will know how to budget money quickly and easily.
How to budget money quickly and simply:
Simplicity Makes a Plan Work
Do you remember the multi-worksheet, 100-category, tenth-grade-algebra Excel spreadsheet you downloaded last week?
Don't worry. I couldn't learn how to budget money with it either.
The best plan in the world may be so complicated that it will never work out.
Simple is not the same as easy
"Easy" requires little thought, little effort, little motivation.
"Simple" means easily understood, followable, or doable.
Spending our money is easy. Too easy.
Planning our spending is simple. But not easy.
Budgeting money requires thinking, concentration, and effort for it to work.
I keep my family budget simple by using the fewest categories I reasonably can.
Use As Few Categories As Possible
There are a zillion different expenses. We could make a spreadsheet with twelve columns and four hundred rows and still not list everything we could possibly "budget" for.
But all of those expenses can be grouped together.
Then we can boil our budget down to a handful of sections...
- Income
- Give & Save
- Living Expenses
- Bills & Debts
- Periodic Expenses
Scan through a list of every possible income and expense, so you don't forget anything.
Combine those expenses together under each of the above categories.
Conclusion
We've created a budget that takes up less than a fourth of a page.
We haven't had to mess with any software!
We haven't had to fill in a huge spreadsheet!
Keeping your expenses simple will help you stick to your budget.
Simplicity really does make a plan work.
