artofthecoupon.com

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A lot of people that I know are struggling.  They are in their mid-twenties, with college degrees (from good 4 year colleges) or higher.  Some live at home with their parents.  Others live paycheck to paycheck with no health insurance.  None of us are married, none of us own houses, and a lot of us don’t know exactly what our career paths or future goals are.  Compare this to our parents… almost all of our parents were married and homeowners by the time they were our ages; in fact, most of our parents were younger than we are now when we were born.  A lot of people from this baby boomer generation don’t seem to understand what is wrong with us- why we can’t get our acts together, settle into careers and follow the accepted ‘path’ along life’s road.   (more…)

I have reviewed 3 different popular systems of budgeting over the last few days, and I found problems with all of them.  We set up a budget primarily by tracking our expenses for a few months, and modifying and tweaking.  This may not work for everyone, but it definitely was the way to go for us.   (more…)

The Envelope System is not exactly a budget, it is more a way of implementing a budget. But, it is still the way a lot of people manage money so we definitely gave it a bit of thought in deciding how to handle our finances.  Ultimately, we decided it wasn’t the way to go for us, but it is still a pretty worthy way of managing the money business involved in running your day to day life. (more…)

Yesterday, I talked about the 60% solution as a budgeting method.  Today, I’ll be considering The Zero Based Budget.  Dave Ramsey Advocates seem to use this budgeting method a lot, and there is definitely some merit to it.   (more…)

How do you set up a budget?  Do you sit down one day and decide “this is how much I am going to spend on X”?  What do you base the amounts on?  Do you use your past expenses to set up your budget?  But what if you were spending way too much in the past?  This can be confusing for people first starting to budget.  But, even for long-time budgeters, its always interesting to hear about different ideas for tweaking.  So, I’ll be talking about a few of the common ways of setting up a budget, and giving my thoughts on each. (more…)

What are your New Years resolutions? I hope it is to set up a budget, I’ve got a little mini-series coming up and a few different ways of setting one up…