Budgeting

Do you know where all your money goes? Do you wonder why as soon as you get paid the money just seems to disappear leaving you broke until the next pay check? And what about saving for retirement, or do you plan on working for the rest of your life? Successful businesses and people have a budget and so should you. If you don't you need to create a personal budget today. Think about it, a business has to carefully track income and expenses in order to successfully turn a profit. If businesses ran their budgets the same way most Americans keep their personal budgets most of them would fail.

And that's precisely the point; the vast majority of people in the United States are failing financially. If you are one of them and you want to do something about it you need to create a personal budget. By not controlling your money you lose the opportunity make your money work for you. Those who have built personal wealth have done so by telling their money what to do, not because they have high paying jobs or inherited it. And they do this by creating a budget, or cash flow plan, that tracks every dollar that comes in and every dollar that goes out.

The first step to financial wellness and then freedom is taking responsibility for your personal finances. This means that the buck starts and stops with you. There is no one to blame for the monetary situation you are in except you and once you take that responsibility and decide to do something about it the only thing that can stop you from reaching your goal is you!

A budget can be a scary thing for most people because most of the time it shows them spending habits that are rather embarrassing. Once they list out their income in one column and their expenses in another column the truth comes out and it isn't always pretty.

Once you have decided to take back control of your money and make it work for you the first thing to do is get out a piece of paper and a pencil and start making a budget. Before you can begin to set financial goals you need to know how much monthly income you have and how much your monthly expenses are. Write it all down in two columns; one for income and one for expenses and leave nothing out. You have to be honest with your finances or your budget will not be worth the paper it is written on.

Once everything is written down and added up take some time to look it over carefully. Your first budget may not be perfect but it will give you a good idea where you stand financially. It will also give a good starting point to start the process of telling your money what to do. There will be expenses that seem outrageous once you can see them and this is the time to decide where and what needs to be cut or eliminated so that you can reach your financial goals. Chances are that up until this point the money just came and went as if on a whim. Building wealth is not something that happens on a whim, it takes patience, the ability to make sacrifices, and a plan. The personal budget you create is the plan, use it wisely.