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Archive for March, 2008

Budgets are good… Budgets are great…

But who really likes to budget, they truly are a pain in the rear and I have not found one person who likes doing a personal budget.

1. Why do people hate budgets so much?

Many people associate budgets with being poor, having do watch every penny. People often have the idea that if you do not know how much you really are spending that it doesn’t really seem that bad. To some maintaining a budget is like admitting that darn I screwed up and now I have to live like I am poor to get out of it. They then will usually not do the budget and just keep spending more than they make digging a larger and larger hole.

2. I hate budgets, now what?

I would only recommend this if you cannot follow a budget. You need to setup automatic deductions that will pull a set amount of money each pay period into a savings account, this will force you to live on less and save more. The best way to make this work is to only spend cash, that way you cannot spend more than you actually have. If you continue to use credit cards you will over spend and dig a bigger hole.

This has personally worked very well for me.

Derrick

Have you ever walked through a store and come down an aisle and see some little kid all red in the face, saying ” I want it right now!” Well that is kind of how I feel. My current TV is almost 10 years old and the picture tube is starting to go. I can’t tell you how many times I surfed over to the Amazon website and looked the the Sony XBR LCDs and Samsung models, I just can’t bring myself to buy one(yet).

I have also considered following my own advice and canceling TV, currently the monthly payments do not hurt me and are within my budget, I do not have any debt other than my mortgage and a car payment, if I had one smidge of debt other that these two items you bet TV service would have been long gone.

This brings me to the real point of this post, how many times do we really really want something, but do we really need it? I know I fight these urges and I bet many of you feel the same way.

What are some of the other things that I have really been interested in? The Ipod Touch, a mac book pro and a few other gadgets.

Derrick