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 →]