Personal Finance Budgeting

Personal finance budgeting is on of the key ingredients to building wealth. It allows you to quickly pay down debt, save for college, regularly invest so you can enjoy an early retirement, and live a stress free. When you budget appropriately, you can comfortably go about your life knowing exactly how much money you have coming in and how much you can afford to spend.

Personal finance budgeting sounds like a boring thing to do, and most people do not like working with numbers, but it's really easy. I spend maybe 10 minutes a week, sometimes every other week, to budget, and I do it the hard way. I simply created an Excel spreadsheet that is organized by categories: housing, cash withdrawals, food, reoccurring expenses, gas and other. Once a week, or every other week, I log in to my bank account and credit card accounts and copy my expenses in the appropriate column. The spreadsheet automatically totals my expenses up and subtracts that from my monthly budget. So all I have to do is plug in my expense and the spreadsheet tells me how much money I have left.

Like I said earlier, this is the hard way. There personal finance budgeting programs that will actually do all of this work for you, and some of them are free. You simply register for a new account online, enter your banking and credit card information, and the online program will automatically download all of your transactions, sort them into appropriate categories, and produce many visual graphs to help you understand where your money is going. These programs will send you email or text notifications to let you know when you are nearing your budget, and will even produce recommendations for you on how to reduce your expenses by suggesting where to save and showing you how you stack up to the average consumer.

The programs are very secure as well. Most use the same technology that online banks use, and they do not actually allow you to make any financial transactions from within the system. That means that even if someone where to hack into your account, all they would see is what you are spending your money on. An account number can not be found anywhere within these systems, so they are safe and secure.

Budgeting does not have to be difficult at all. When you automate he process, budgeting does not require you to crunch any numbers or balancing checkbooks. Thanks to online banking, it's as simple as setting up an account and letting the software do the budgeting for you. Now you can get your personal finance on track and pay down your debt and accumulate more wealth with hardly any effort at all.

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