Savings/Budgeting

What does it mean to budget?

Budgeting meaning different things to different people. Some people look at it as only having $100 a week to spend, and you need to pick how much you spend on what items. Other people look at it as spending still spending a $100 a week, but $50 is for groceries, $10 is for gas, and the rest is for activities. No matter how you look at budgeting, it all comes down to setting a limit on how much you can spend in a given time frame or at a given location.

When I go grocery shopping, I’ve learned that I spend around $30 a trip. Sometimes I go every week, and other times I go every 2 weeks. Either way, I try to set a limit of $40, in case I need a little something extra that trip.

Budgeting also raises the question of what to do with the leftover money, if there is any. In my opinion, I suggest putting the leftover money somewhere separate, like a bank account or somewhere safe in your room where no one will see or find it. Of course, you could roll over the money to the next week’s spending, but that could cause some issues. If you start to roll over money each week, you could start to get use to having that amount in mind instead of the original amount.

Say you started with $100 a week and rolled $20 over into the next week. That next week you’d have $120 to spend, so maybe you buy or do something a little extra for that week and spend the whole $120. The following week you’d only have the $100, but what if you want to another thing that costs a little extra. Since you do have anything rolled over or in a savings, most likely you shouldn’t be doing that extra thing. Of course you could easily take out more money to do it, but that defeats the whole purpose of budgeting.

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