You earn good income, have enough money to pay bills and contribute to savings, and feel like you made it. Do you REALLY need to keep up with a budget once you’re financially secure?
Uh, yeah. You should budget (and you should stop thinking of “budgeting” as a bad word). It’s a mindfulness exercise for your finances.
Although it might feel like budgeting is basic personal finance 101, or that it’s only something you do when money is tight and you need to carefully manage every last penny, a budget is always a useful tool for your cash flow.
In fact, the more money you earn and need to manage, the more important it is to pay close attention. You should budget because it can help you do just that as you spend more time handling your increasingly complex financial life.
Without a budget, you may miss opportunities to optimize and maximize the dollars you have. It also leaves you without critical data that you need to make fully informed spending and saving decisions.
In this episode, we explore why budgeting is not a basic financial function — and why the more successful you become and the more money you earn, the bigger the role a great budget can play in your continued prosperity.
We also share how we personally budget, the money meetings we have each quarter, some of the complexities of our own cash flow, and we provide a few tips on employing the same bucketing strategy that we use to ensure we save and invest appropriately so we can spend freely and without guilt.
Jump into the episode here:
Further Reading & Resources from the Show
- Get more ideas on how to manage your money as a couple with our blog post on the topic.
- Learn more about our decision to buy a vacation-type home (rather than your standard starter home in the suburbs).
- A budget is one way to optimize your financial life. Here’s the podcast episode you need if you’d like to explore 5 other strategies to maximize your money.
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