how to budget personal finances

Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

Despite how simple the process can be, most of us are terrible at saving and paying bills. Here's a strategy to effectively automate most of your finances to keep you saving and out of late fee trouble.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich.com has put together a system for managing your personal finances that only takes about an hour of your time each week. The video above fully explains the process in detail, but here's the gist. First, you want to set up your bills and other payments so they're all happening on the day you get your first paycheck of the month (the first of the month for most people). Once you have that in place, you want to set up automatic savings plans (Sethi suggests using Ing Direct) with sub-savings accounts that let you organize your savings into specific categories (vacation, wedding, etc.). You'll also want to send a percentage of your paycheck to your 401k, and have all of this happen immediately so that the money you see when you get paid is the money left when everything has already been saved. From there, you automatically pay as many bills as you can with your credit card (and then pay the credit card bill on pay day). For the bills you can't pay with your credit card (like rent, in most cases), you can use your online banking to automatically issue a check. This will leave a little money leftover in your checking account that you can use to budget for guilt-free spending and cash withdrawals.

As someone who's often fallen victim to the faults of automatic payments systems (despite frequently using them), definitely do not forget to stay on top of your bills nonetheless. Make sure you set some time aside at least once a month to do a little maintenance and make sure there are no bugs causing your automated finance system to break down. Sethi isn't suggesting a set-it-and-forget-it automated finance system by any means, but as someone who hates paying bills I know how easy it can be to procrastinate and ignore the task. If you set up a good automated system like this one, you'll be at a point where all you have to do is watch and fix the occasional problem as the most important things are being taken care of for you.

Did the author actually say that "borrowing now exceeds tax revenue"? How embarrassing!



I hate to be the one that tells you, Megan, but every nation DESIGNED their currency operations to work that way, when they went off of the gold std back in the 1920s & 1930s. The last vestige, pegging to the $US & thereby to gold, disappeared in 1973. That's been a long time. In 2010 there is simply no excuse for not knowing how simple monetary operations work. It's not rocket science.



In nearly every country in the world, currency creation & currency supply is now fairly directly linked only to public initiative and the general well being of the populous. If population or economic activity increases, OF COURSE currency supply must increase faster than taxes. What part of economic growth don't people understand? Currency operations are not so different from motherhood. You feed the fetus & baby first, often for years, keep accurate growth records, and your family, tribe or nation benefits only in the long run. There's no inherent value in the record keeping itself. Keep that in mind & everything else falls into place.



CURRENCY ISSUERS manage real goods budgets, and issue currency only for internal bookkeeping, to denominate real transactions. (& issuers tax ONLY to control inflation and/or to serve narrow political interests; usually to keep the poor poor & make the rich richer)



CURRENCY USERS typically use currency budgets as an accurate, short term proxy for a local real goods budget. But even currency users should never be confused enough to try to save "fiat" instead of building capabilities or at least hoarding more real assets.



Beardsley Ruml pointed out the obvious, in 1946, "Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete" http://tinyurl.com/y3dkda3



If anyone has trouble understanding how monetary operations actually work, try these intro texts.



http://www.monetary.org/briefusmonetaryhistory.htm

http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/pn-pdf/PolicyNote2006-1.pdf

http://moslereconomics.com/2009/12/10/7-deadly-innocent-frauds/

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=2943

http://www.moslereconomics.com/2009/11/04/short-rate-thoughts-deflation-radical-thesis-turnaround/

http://www.eh.net/book_reviews/handbook-world-exchange-rates-1590-1914
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