Category — Budgets

This is part 1 of the series ‘Budgets For Dummies.’

Suppose you only got paid once per year. You no longer get a check every other Friday. You get one check for $40,000 on January 1 and won’t get another one until the following year. What would you do? Would you go take a big vacation, buy a new new car, a new boat? How would you know how much you could spend on food or entertainment? What if you spent too much and ran out of money in September? The only way that you could survive is on a [tag]budget[/tag]. The word budget scares a lot of people. “I don’t want to live on a budget, it’s too restricting!” or “I don’t need a budget to tell me how to spend my money!”

I want to show you why you need a budget and how it frees your spending instead of restricting it. After that we’ll look at how simple it is to create and maintain a solid budget. [Read more →]

You have a business – your personal finances. The problem is that many of us need help. We are in debt. Yesterday I presented the idea that you are a manager over your financial resources. You are the chief financial officer of your personal life. You and only you are in control of your spending habits. As the financial controller, you have two options – you can be wasteful or you can be a faithful. The faithful manager is the one that really cares about their finances. They care about taking care of the resources that have been given to them. They care about providing for their families and they care about helping others. The faithful manager is where we all should want to be.

If you choose to go down the road of being a faithful manager instead of the wasteful manager then you must know that it isn’t easy! This article looks great on paper, but it can be much more difficult to follow once you begin to put it into practice. I promise you that distractions will come up, life will get in the way and you’ll begin to slide back towards being the wasteful manager. To make it easier, I’ve broken this task down into smaller bites. First, please read through this entire article. Then I challenge you to print it out and hang it somewhere where you’ll see it. That may sound silly, but being a good manager isn’t just changing your actions, it’s changing your entire mindset. So post it where you can see it and think about it every day.

To be the faithful manager you must:

• Establish short term goals
• Establish long term goals
• Lower overhead
• Plan for down times
• Practice profit sharing

[Read more →]