A budget is an external framework that helps me manage my executive function. Could totally be getting the causality backwards here but all the most stable times of my life have been when I kept a budget. Without a budget I collapse and start spending money on extraneous consumer goods.
Budgets are useful tools, but they really should be temporary. If you have a major change in income or expenses, it can warrant monitoring for a while. But once you’ve reached a point of financial stability, you will know what you can afford already. Setting up auto pay on regular bills, putting balance alerts on your accounts, and just acting your wage makes it pretty easy.
But honestly, what you can afford is just a hard cap on what you should be spending. You should be living below your means already so you can build up investments to retire on. Then unexpected expenses are easily handled by scratching something off your emergency fund. And windfalls mean you can reach your financial independence goals that much faster. Until then, you don’t have to live as if you’re destitute, but just be frugal.
Seriously, the amount of people living paycheck to paycheck is horrifying. If you are one of them, you should be alarmed. Things aren’t going to get cheaper, and wages are going to struggle to keep up. And at a certain point, you won’t be able to work. So you have to remember that your future self is a dependent for your current self.
If you haven’t planned much, here’s a helpful priority pipeline for how to work towards financial security. I stole it from one of the finance subreddits. It assumes you’re in the US for the tax-privileged efficiency stuff, but the gist is just keep putting your money in the most important/efficient buckets until they’re full, then move on to the next.
Basically my financial situation is:
Me work. Me get paid. Banana purchase. Repeat.I too am an ape
The worst part is that I love math and numbers…just hate money and having to worry about it.
Who needs budgets when you have terrible anxiety about spending money
the only cure is buying shiny new thing™️
Better to buy second hand shiny thing to save money.
thank you Venator from the Deadlock
Is there a character called Venator in Deadlock?
I only played it briefly, I’m more of a fan of TF2C, I chose my Venator handle by translating the huntsman to Latin in Google translate when it first came out 😅
yeah he was added in the last batch of characters, fitting name for a monster hunter from the vatican
his ultimate is a holy crossbow and his ‘1’ is a holy hand grenade
God no. I got in so much debt with ADHD and no budget. Finding YNAB saved my ass and allowed me to buy a house right before it became impossible to do so. Now I won’t pay YNABs insane prices but I still use the same methods.
But obviously I have ADHD so I’ve had to restart that budget many many times. I’ve forgotten about it multiple times over the last 13 years. But I’m finally consistent with it. I check it when I’m going to make a big purchase, I know my general what I need weekly, and I fully review it every pay day (or you know, 2 days later shhh).
every two years I try to do spending analysis and load up ynab again (the original desktop version)
it lasts shorter every time I do it, and I just revert back to “okay I make about this much, these are my bills and savings that automatically transfer/pay, so I should be able to spend around x amount” and then just keeping an eye on minimum balances. I just can’t do all the work categorizing spending like I just don’t really care where I’m spending money, as long as it’s within reason
Buckets has a similar vibe to ynab, but less demanding in that regard. You can do it if you want, but it can be a pretty basic envelope system too.
🙌 putting all my stuff into ynab4 since like 2012, i just do it once a week
Basically what I do with Actual Budget lol. God I loved YNAB but I made the mistake of upgrading to NYNAB when they rolled that out. It was good for a bit but it’s so very expensive now and they added this nasty social media aspect to it and it’s just bloated, laggy, and expensive. I think I started with them in 2012 and I left last year.
My wife got us on YNAB, and we were able to pay off her student loans within a few years. We are only able to eat and afford clothes because of her immense efforts with YNAB.
Although, the insane prices are indeed becoming unbearable. I’m also getting more concerned about privacy and their priorities as a company. I’d love to switch to Actual Budget, but there are just a few features on which my wife completely relies which don’t exist in AB.
Ooohh which features?
I don’t remember. You’ll have to ask her yourself.
I have a math brain; I do not, however, have a brain that can make plans or follow them consistently
Theres loads of ways to manage your spending without a budget, more effective for most people too.
A good budget won’t tell you how not to spend your money, it should tell you how you can spend your money.
People hear the word budget and think it means tightening the belt and cutting back but that doesn’t have to be the case. Your income doesn’t change when you go on a budget so all you’re gaining is clarity as to where your money is going.
You don’t need a budget, just a crippling sense of guilt about spending money on anything other than the absolute essentials…
there’s no point to a budget if you minimize all costs anyways, and it means i get a surprise amount left over at the end of every month which i can do whatever i want with.
Which is usually just letting it pile up because i don’t know if my welfare will be denied at some point and having that buffer means i can afford to replace things every now and then.
You have money left over at the end of the month?
yes, through the magic of eliminating every expense i can.
My expenses are: Rent, electricity, internet, phone service, home insurance, bus ticket (in the winter), and food (of which i’ve been steadily finding cheaper and cheaper things to cook, most recently discovering that you can just fry the shit out of mixed frozen vegetables and it tastes amazing).It’s slightly terrifying to see what other people spend money on, like paying 5€ for a SINGLE CUP OF COFFEE… Or, like, owning a car at all. Buddy maybe you could afford to heat your luxurious mansion if you weren’t blowing half your fucking income on a living room with 4 wheels?
An incredible amount of people, probably most people, just seem to be fundamentally incapable of recognizing expenses as being expenses. Their brain just classes that cup of coffee as something required to live and thus the cost doesn’t exist. They’ll buy it every single day, even as it doubles in cost, and i’m not sure if the act of paying even consciously registers.
This is exactly why I went for an e-scooter instead of a car. It has enough range to get me anywhere around town and back, it’s fast enough to safely ride on the roads, and above all else it doesn’t require costly refueling, insurance, or a license. I just plug it in and it’s ready to go by the next time I need to use it. It has turn signals, suspension, and a bright enough headlight/taillight to be perfectly suited for nighttime use too.
💯
I just want to check though: Do you wear motorbike safety gear? Because you REALLY REALLY should, e-scooters are great but the one thing they are not is safe (if you go faster than a moderate run).
I wear proper safety equipment, including a helmet with a face shield as well as knee and armpads. My scooter is electronically limited in speed so I can’t go any faster than a bike can. No need to worry!
I don’t think I even check my account enough. My coworkers look at me in horror when I tell them that I just sort of eyeball the bank account every now and then to see that the approximate amount was put in.
…and, honestly? Fuck their thinking anyway. I know they aren’t breaking out calculator, pen&paper, or even chatfuckpt to ensure the pennies are exactly matching. Knowing that I can spend $5 once a month on a game, or pay for a prescription, isn’t exactly hard. I just always keep way under what any budget would tell me anyway. I don’t need a budget to tell me how much to put away for retirement, that shit is going the way of the dodo here soon.
That’s a good way of describing my system. I put the bills on auto pay and stop spending when it runs out.
My budget has been “don’t spend too much” for the last 10 years and it’s worked out wonderfully. You don’t need a clever laid out plan, you just need to ask yourself “how can I spend even less ?”
Cancel every subscription immediately unless you actually need it. Pirate everything. Get everything on sale or thrift it. Either buy the cheapest thing you can, or spend enough to buy the indestructible version you’ll keep for 15-20 years. Fix problems immediately for cheap before they get expensive.
As a result I’m still managing to save up money while my income is under 10K a year.
For tools you need it is so important to keep in mind that if:
you definitely need it only once - get the cheap one.
you will use it in the future - get the expensive one that laborers use.
Cheap tools are a money and a time sink
I’m in the Savage camp. Get the cheapest tool first, use it until it’s insufficient. By that time, you should have figured out which features you actually need, which you don’t, and what a good tool looks like.
I’m not always certain which tools will get significant usage (some, yes, but not all). If I bought the “good” tool every time, I’d have thousands of dollars sunk into tools I rarely use.
If you have a determined field, yeah sure, spend the money up front. But if you’re a dabbler, you spend less overall cheaping out on entry models.
Same. My philosophy has always been to spend as little as possible and got my debts paid as soon as possible so they’re not hanging over my head.
What does “official budget” mean? Serious question, what else are you supposed to do other than check your account every once in a while*?
* (and by that I mean get notifications from your bank if there’s any movement)
Some people use apps or spreadsheets to have a very structured budget. I am not one of them. I have a concept of a budget.
I use a spreadsheet. Mainly so I can see where my money is going/how much I need to get paid to continue not being homeless.
To be very fair though this isn’t a skill I learned so much as one that was forced on me by the military before they’d let me “adult”. By adult I mean live on my own.
Very interesting, how’d they enforce that?
By not providing BAH/BAS (Housing allowance/Food allowance) to unmarried members of the military who wanted to move out of the barracks without proof they had had financial counseling.
You can even predict more or less how much you’re going to spend by your expenses history, but configuring the formula for that on a spreadsheet, or at least figuring it out, is a major pain. But once done, helps a lot. =D
In control enough of your finances enough to know about how much you spend on food, fun, and other living expenses, as well as awareness of how much you have (or dont have) available for spur of the moment things like bar trips or whatever on a paycheckly basis.
Bonus points for saving for plans for this year, to include that concert you wanted to see. Bonus bonus points for having some sort of plan for retirement beyond social security and walmart greeter.
I have an excel sheet with basic things like my income, rent, other monthly items, and rough estimates for things like groceries or regular hobbies. Then I look at what’s left over and use that as a reference point. I definitely don’t keep a very strict budget, and you vould argue it doesn’t fit the bill for an “official budget”, but it’s worked well enough for me so far
Also my banking app has some basic budgetary info, so I can look at my monthly spending and such
What does “official budget” mean?
A pre-plan for spending, generally involving an upper limit by category, including not only existing scheduled payments, but also ad-hoc spending.
Like most plans, a budget can be as loose or a tight as you want, and you may or may not follow it, but just building it can result in a more successful approach.
I think most people use a spreadsheet, so they can include some things that are auto-calculated, but that’s not a essential property.
I feel like there’s a certain minimum income level/social safety net you need to have to be able to live like this. Like at some point the desire to keep having food/shelter becomes enough of a motivating factor that you have to work out what you need to do.
I’m frugal by nature. For most of my life I’ve always had enough savings to buy almost anything I want. Whenever I get a “bonus” from somewhere, I’m not even tempted to go on a spending spree - it doesn’t enable me to buy anything I couldn’t have already bought anyway. I’m way more excited about seeing the value of my investments go up than I would be about a new iPhone or whatever.
I live in an old house, wear old clothes, drive an old truck, never travel, never eat out, etc. I guess I just value different things than some other people. I’d rather be financially secure and look poor than the other way around.
