Have you ever set a personal budget for yourself? Are you still sticking to it? My guess is that you answered these questions in a sequence of “yes” to the first, and “no” to the second. We all have great intentions of spending our money wisely in accordance with our plan, but it hardly ever happens that way.
At the end of the month (if we make it that long), we realize that we aren’t able to follow our budget at all and we just decide to throw in the towel.
Budgeting doesn’t have to be like this though, and it doesn’t have to be a chore either. It can be both fun and can be fairly simple at the same time. In order to get you through this process and follow your budget a little better this time, let’s take a look at why personal budgets often fail.
1) You Cut Out The Fun – Often times, when people make a budget for themselves, they just put all of their known bills in there and set up an amount for the “food” category, but when it comes to having fun, this is left out of the budget entirely!
Sure, you might be tight on money, but you should still do your best to budget in some fun. Without any release from the daily grind, you’re going to make yourself nuts, and you’re ultimately setting yourself up for failure.
2) You Forgot About the “Unexpected” and Non-recurring” Expenses – There are plenty of bills that hit your account each month. These are the ones that are easy to predict, but then there are bills that only happen once every few months, or every year.
Things like car insurance, registration, oil changes – these don’t pop up each month, but you should still put them into your monthly budget because you should be saving up for these expenses.
Then, there are items like your roof. It most likely doesn’t need repair for another 3 or 4 years, but when that $5,000 expense comes your way, you’re going to wish that you’d been saving up for it all along.
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