Budgeting can be a valuable exercise for any family, whether you’re just scraping by or you have a nice cash cushion month to month. But “month to month” is one of the key assumptions of most budgets. Since most of us get paid on a twice-monthly or monthly schedule, it makes sense to budget across the same time period.
This works fine for most expenses like your mortgage payment, utilities, groceries, shopping, and clothing purchases, but what about large, irregular expenses?
In the spring of 2015, Kellie and I took a dream trip to Europe. The bulk of our time was spent in Budapest, Hungary, where she had served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. After Budapest, we spent a few days in Vienna, Prague, and Dresden, Germany. It was truly an experience of a lifetime, and we’ve looked back on it fondly many times since.
A happy 2019 to you all.
I hope last year was a great one for you, and that you’re looking forward to this new year, with the chance for new beginnings. I love starting fresh with the opportunity to set new goals and priorities.
To that end, I’d like to share 5 financial tips worth considering as you think about how you might want to tune-up your financial life this year. These are just suggestions, but in the many financial conversations I’ve had with others, these five points hit on resolving some of the biggest financial concerns I hear when I talk with others.
I hope you enjoy my latest (and first!) post of 2019.
Last week I gave a presentation on 3 ways to improve your financial health. I love getting down to the nuts and bolts of personal finance! We (including financial planners) often make the topic more complicated than it needs to be. When you really gets down to it, you can address 80% of your financial management problems with three things: a budget, a savings plan, and a debt payoff plan.
In this article I’ll explain these 3 points, and for each I’ll give you a simple exercise you can implement this weekend--each one taking about 30 minutes.