Personal Budget Planning Financial Juggling Act?

Does your lack of personal budget planning have you in a financial juggling act? In today’s society, it seems commonly accepted that families are living above their means; a juggling act that just cannot be sustained.

Does anyone remember Enron? What makes us think that the same sort of “robbing from Peter to pay Paul” mentality that sunk that corporation and left so many of its employees broke and bankrupt is sustainable on the family scale?

Yet, most heads of household will tell you that they live “paycheck to paycheck” as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Well, it is not. In order to sustain a household budget and exercise reasonable personal money management, families and individuals must accept the notion of living below their means. This does not mean you deprive yourself and your loved ones of life's essentials, or that you need to go live under the bridge; it simply means you need to begin personal budget planning.

There’s an old saying that states, “in order to get, you have to give.” Personal budget planning works on the same principal. In order to get what you want in the future, you are going to have to give up some of your old spending habits in the present. Most of the items you will be eliminating from your life are things that someone else convinced you that you need, and some of them are things you don’t even really want. Correct?

What Happened?

Some time ago, the banks, lenders, and corporations began a plan to get Americans into debt. As part of that plan, they began to convince us to live above our means. They extended unheard of amounts of credit and began an effort to make us believe that it is common place to spend more money than you make. This is fundamentally ridiculous. It is the same as saying you can drive further than the amount of gasoline in your tank allows. Well, give it a try and see how far you get. Thinking it is okay to spend more than you earn has caused our current economic recession.

Personal budget planning will show you what happens when you change your way of thinking about money and begin to spend less than you earn. You will want to experience it for yourself, but I can tell you now what this change in thinking about money will bring about. It will usher in a lifestyle where you eliminate credit card debt, own your home free and clear, have plenty of money for your children’s education, and lots of cash for retirement.

Oh, and of course the peace of mind having learned how to achieve financial freedom.

It Becomes Your Choice

Listen, it is a given that what you spend is gone. You just cannot get that money back. But what you save is yours forever, or until you spend it for what you really want. Do you really want that high calorie, greasy fast-food lunch so bad that you’re willing to take the eight dollars it costs from your child’s college fund, or would you rather put it in an education savings account where it can grow fat, instead of you, between now and when your child’s tuition comes due?

It really is that easy a choice, when you come down to it. That is what personal budget planning is all about: making easy choices now that will benefit you and your family in the future.

The next article in this budget planning series is about living debt free with personal budget planning, teaching you to not agonize over the process before it even begins.

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