Consciously plan your financial future.  A budget is not designed to deprive, it’s meant to tell you how much you have left over to spend guilt-free after you’ve paid your bills and funded your retirement account. 

TAGS: budgeting, finance

The Simple Dollar had a nice post about taking the training wheels off money management. Basically, after creating a plan to recover from a financial meltdown and after obsessively tracking every penny for awhile, the blogger realized he’d been spending less and less time managing his money–and that this was a good thing:

 In short, I began to trust myself. I had seen the results time and time again of my good financial behaviors - my account balances went up and my debts went down. Eventually, I began to trust these principles, and that trust led directly to a reduced need to keep running the numbers and micromanaging everything.

That’s the groove we want to be in when it comes to money–neither obsessive nor unconscious. If we’ve been unconscious and let things get into a mess, then a little obsession may be in order until we’re back on track. Once we’re on track, though, a good system should keep us there without excessive monitoring or worry.

TAGS: budgeting, financial planning, personal finance, simplifying