I've had a lot of people tell me that setting up their
budget was simple but when it came to living by it
payday after payday they admitted losing interest in
a very short time.

Let's face it. The day to day drudgery of trying to
figure out how to best spend your money isn't the most
interesting aspect of our lives.

Let me see if I can make the budget process a little
more appealing to you. I don't have any magic or secret
process to tell you about but I do have a method that
will show you why a budget doesn't have to be boring.

I can do this with one word. GOALS

When we think of goals most of us look far into the future
to our retirement. That's the problem. It's hard to
imagine when your 20 what you will need when you are 65.

Accomplishing your goals doesn't have to take a lifetime.
Even when they do you can set milestones along the way to
break it up and get a sense of accomplishment much earlier.

If you have problems staying on a budget try setting some
short term goals. We can start with an easy one. Try to
save $100 without missing it.

Unless you have no income at all this is easy. Don't spend
any coins for any reason. If you buy something for 25 cents
break a dollar. Then all you have to do is put the change out
of your pocket or purse in a jar every day.

This sounds simple enough and you've probably heard about
saving change before. If you are a skeptic like I was you
probably think that this isn't going to lead to any real
savings at all.

Let's get back to that $100 I was talking about. How long
do you think it would take you to save enough change to
equal $100. 6 months? 1 year?

The fact is that the average person can save $100 in less
than three months. In some cases even sooner. That's not
very long to accomplish a goal.

Now let's look at setting milestones using the same method.
Roll your change once a month to see how close you are to
your goal. Write down how much you saved that month on a
piece of paper and put that and your rolled change back in
the jar. Keep doing this until you've reached your $100
goal.

Now, what do you do with that $100? You could put it in a
savings account and earn a little interest but it still
wouldn't be worth much more than $100 even after a year.

My suggestion would be to pay it on one of your credit cards.
That way you could turn that $100 into much more with
the interest you would save.

It may sound like I strayed from the topic of this article by
talking about saving your change. Actually a budget is just
a system of reaching goals. You do this by working backwards.
You decide what it is you want to do and then make all of your
money decisions based on that end.

Setting up and maintaining a budget is going to take
organization and discipline. This task will be much easier
if you are working toward something you really want.

To learn more about Budgets you can visit The Complete
Budget and Bill Organizer
http://www.homemoneyhelp.com/BBOonline.html
to find Budget Stretcher's free budget system complete
with all of the forms and worksheets.



About the Author
Terry Rigg is the author of Living Within Your Means - The Easy
Way http://www.homemoneyhelp.com/ebookadpage.html and editor
of The FREE Budget Stretcher Newsletter and Budget Stretcher
web site http://www.homemoneyhelp.com. He has 25 years of
experience counseling individuals and families concerning their
personal finances. Use this email link to get a list of all of
Terry's articles by autoresponder at:
mailto:articlelist@budgetstretcherpremium.com