Cut The Costs And Keep The Change: Part 3

One of the biggest changes that need to be made when you are trying to cut the costs is to make a budget.  I know, the dreaded B word!!!  Yes we are going there and we are going to take about it in depth.  Ok, maybe not that deep, but enough to help you see how truly important this is.

I have learned in recent months how truly important this is.  We spent months and months “having a budget”.  Basically we would sit down and print out what we spent the last month and fill in the blanks of out budget sheet with what we spent last month.  then we would file it way and not look at it again until we would do it all over again at the beginning of each month.  Needless to say, we were always moving money from our savings to cover the costs we had over the budget amount.

When we started to listen to Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, We realized what exactly we were doing wrong.  We were looking at our budget as a spending log instead of telling our money where to go and living by this.  I can not tell you how much more aware we have been of our spending and everyday costs since we started viewing our budget that way.

I did a series of 3 posts a while back on how to budget.  you can view it HERE.  Once you have a budget that has no left over money and all your expenses taken care of you can work on living it.  This is so hard but once you get in a habit, it becomes a lot easier.  It becomes something you love to do because it brings you peace and you are excited that you have money to spend, you know where it is going and you are planning for the future.