I absolutely love to budget. It thrills me. I know some of you may be thinking I am a little insane, but I really do find pleasure in not only managing but also finding ways to save money. That being said, I am not the most frugal person in the world, I'm ashamed to admit. But the further I get in life, the more ways I am finding to save money, and I want to be able to share that with others.
Here is a little background on me. I am currently 26 years old, and I am a stay-at-home mom to a beautiful little girl named Ellie who just turned two last month (March). I like to say I am taking the scenic route to getting my college degree. I started off at a community college wanting to get my degree in Graphic Designing. That turned into wanting to be a Secondary Education teacher majoring in English and minoring in Mathematics, which later turned into me wanting to be an Pediatric Oncologist because I loved studying anatomy and physiology, and I wanted to help sick children. I was well on my way to starting that career when I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. A couple weeks later I had my head in a bucket throwing up everything I ate with a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum which lasted 5 months until I got it under control with medication. Needless to say, I didn't finish that degree.
Since my husband had landed a great job while I was pregnant, we decided to have me stay home. He was in charge of making the money, and I was in charge of paying the bills and managing the budget. The budget. We had never had one before, and I had no idea how to make one. I basically just wrote what I wanted to spend and then our expenses after that and subtracted it. If I was over budget, I guess I would fix it the following month. I spent hours upon hours creating spreadsheets that added up across multiple pages with my checking account balance, savings account balances, expenditures by month and week, income by month and week, bills due, etc. The problem was every time I wanted to add something new or delete something, I needed to almost redo the whole spreadsheet, so I gave up and tried doing everything on paper. I would lose the paper or forget bills, and I wasn't consistent because it took FOREVER to continue to manage a system like that.
I wasn't keeping track of how much we were spending; I was just making sure we didn't overspend and overdraft. We weren't saving in advance for larger purchases, we didn't have a big savings account because we kept spending everything we had, we weren't disciplined in categories like groceries or gas because we didn't set a limit... we just set what we wanted to spend, but didn't look at it as a "limit". And when we overspend in several categories, we just overspent in those categories forever; we never paid it back so we could be back on budget because we never thought of that.
A little over a year ago, someone posted a Facebook status about a book called Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, and I decided to check it out. I think I read it in a day and a half. Everything just made sense to me on how to manage my money. We started to follow the program, but the one thing that bothered me is budgeting was stressed, and they had techniques for managing a budget, but there wasn't a real program they recommended to use, and the budgeting software that was on the Dave Ramsey site was not helpful at all. I knew HOW to budget, but I just needed a tool that was easy to use to help me MAINTAIN it.
There are several tools out there. Some are free, and someone you have to pay for. Some have more features, others have less. It would be wonderful to take all of the great features each one has to offer and combine them into ONE tool, and though there really isn't anything out there that does that yet, there is one software program that I have found to be the best tool out there to help manage your money. That program is YNAB (You Need A Budget).
This program combines the zero balance based budget (every dollar needs a job) with the envelope system (amounts in each category roll over into the following month), which creates a wonderful system that can help you manage your money. I love it so much I have decided to create this blog which will focus just on YNAB because it is such a wonderful program. I have also created a budget service where I can help people set up and manage their budgets, give tips for saving money, find things they can cut out of the budget, help manage and pay off debt, etc. I will be using the Dropbox tool to help those manage their budget. I will make another post about this later.
These two things (Dave Ramsey and YNAB) have inspired me to become a financial advisor. I am going to use my budgeting service as part of my portfolio, because I believe a budget is the single most important thing you need to use in order to become financially free. I hope you can use this blog as a tool to help you and your family manage their money. Please feel free to contact me at any time if you would like some help. Like I said, budgeting thrills me!
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