A key to motivating oneself during times of hardship is to set tiny rewards for working toward goals. Another wise idea for motivation is to always have something in mind – the positive end result – while making progress toward a goal. One way to do this financially is to budget a savings account.
By budgeting, people normally mean balancing spending so that there is as much or more money coming in than leaving. For this kind of budget, however, we are going to use a familiar denomination: percentages.
Take a moment now to write down any financial outcomes sought. They may include placing a substantial down-payment on a home, funding a semester of college for either oneself or a child, or saving up enough money to retire one year early.
Next, we will assign a value to each ending. My personal long-term savings goals are for my own and my partner’s retirement, buying my first home (with some furniture), and having a child (diapers are expensive, after all). My short-term savings goals are for an emergency fund of $1,000, a new pot and pan set, and a KitchenAid.
Anybody versed in personal finance knows about Dave Ramsey’s snowball method of debt repayment. We will use a similar method to gain momentum in meeting savings goals. Short-term goals will receive a hefty priority – say, 50% for me. The short-term goals are broken up as follows:
- Emergency fund – 50%
- New pots and pans – 30%
- KitchenAid – 20%
That means 25% of my total savings will be dedicated to building an emergency fund.
Long-term goals are broken down similarly:
- First home purchase – 80%
- My retirement – 5%
- Pete’s retirement – 10% (His retirement age is closer than mine)
- Children – 5%
The exact amounts may need to be tweaked if I decide something in particular is more important.
As for keeping track of everything, you may choose to go the difficult route and open up separate savings accounts for each individual budget, or you may choose the easy (and easy to screw up, if you’re not careful) method of using an Excel spreadsheet. I, personally, use the latter choice.
How do you budget your savings? Do you just have one account that you contribute to because you feel you should?
4 Comments
Gosh, we wish to heavens we could keep expenditures for children to 5% of our home budget. But we are middle class people who like to provide for our kids. Our budget looks like this:
Kids: 25% (Including food, clothing and education.)
We do not believe in unloading our kids on the State to be educated. That’s a great way to lose them.
Our public schools teach no values relative to decency. And, what’s worse, once they have your children, you have no say in terms of who or what goes on at the schools.
You have literally given them away to a group of politicians, often with very strange ideas regarding what being “modern” means.
They will keep your children for twelve years and decide what they will be exposed to during all their critical periods of formation. In the US, we think that it is normal to have high school seniors and college freshmen drunk in the streets with zero values. Welcome to public education, an educational system that threw out even the McDuffy Readers because they contained lessons regarding honesty, chastity, and personal integrity.
Now we distribute condoms, and label 7% of our public school children ADHD, using Ritalin to calm them, a misdiagnosis a full 5% of the time.
Each child has a dosier kept on him or her that the State refers to throughout the child’s life, especially now that computers are rampant. Once even one visit to the principal’s office is recorded, the dossier will turn up in the strangest places to quash a child’s ability to be employed.
For example, have one visit to the principal’s office and then apply to the Secret Service or any government position requiring top clearances and that dossier will haunt your child.
Once your child is the property of the State, he or she remains so forever.
Home: 50%
Everything else: 25%
I am really not very good about keeping track of my money. At this point, I am still receiving support for my parents, and I have always had more than enough, so I just haven’t worried about it. I’m going to be moving away soon and cutting the financial ties, so it would probably be a good idea for me to begin to get those matters in order.
Beth, I only put 5% of my savings toward our future children. In reality, we’re only saving about 10% of our income total. The rest is, unfortunately, going into bills and more bills.
Ana, I have learned a lot from reading websites like The Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly, though they are meant for people who are saving up for big purchases, rather than those who have trouble with everyday financial matters. It also helps to have a boyfriend who supports me while I’m in school.
Great Blog with some very sound personal finance advice. I was unaware of Dave Ramsey’s snowball method so will look that up.
I have just begun to wrestle our personal finances down after a pay cut at work.
By using an Excel Spreadsheet I have persuaded my partner that it’s the unplanned bits and pieces that killed our budget.
We went to a discount grocery store, the items are as good as branded however she bought more. So she saw it as Value For Money I saw it as a lost saving.
We have just finally struck a deal on spending limits per week on unplanned expenses, and a strict limit per week on groceries.
I planned it all out in a spreadsheet and demonstrated we have £200 per month spare after all expenses including allowing for petrol, groceries and newspapers. Question – what are we wasting it on?
I will certainly be back to mine your information about how to get extra money in my pocket
.-= Andrew Peel@Ways To Earn Extra Money´s last blog ..How to avoid trying to sell sheep to pig farmers =-.