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Health & Fitness

Budget Mondays

Monday – 3/31/2014

It’s Monday – a painful day for most people, yours truly included. Sometimes it is made even more painful as we remember just how much money we ended up spending over the weekend.

Budget

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It’s one word that can make people cringe, angry and sad all at the same time, a rare occurrence indeed. There are plenty of reasons for this — people are told at work that their budgets are being cut, their ideas cannot be funded because they are not in the budget, and in our personal life, our budgets don’t usually quite match up to our desires.

Budgeting can be a difficult and tedious task that is time consuming and can also be frustrating. Over the last few weeks we have discussed and analyzed some tips and strategies to help spring clean your personal financial planning for spring, but a key to any personal financial plan is discipline and consistency. Some of the best tips and budget building blocks relating to personal budgeting and financial planning relate to tracking your spending, controlling your inflows and outflows, and building a framework that helps you stick to your budget goals.

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Let’s look at a few tips from a great Kiplinger article:

Keep your budget and your goals simple — pick one goal, or a handful of goals, and achieve them. Zeroing in helps your focus.

Use Cash — numerous studies have shown that paying with cash has an impact on how much you actually spend, and the impact is that it decreases it!

Track your spending — you don’t have to track every single expenditure forever, and even just a brief review of your debit and credit card statements should be sufficient.

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