Your Take: Do You Budget?

August 28, 2009 by Jim

="http://www.bargaineering.com/images/in_posts/you-have-no-money.jpg" alt="Clever Way to Budget" width="240" height="160" />Today’s Your Take will be simple… do you budget? If so, what tools do you use?

If you don’t, why not?

I no longer budget in the strict sense. When I first started working, I budgeted and tracked all my expenses down to the penny in an Excel spreadsheet. This was before the days of tools like Mint or Quicken Online where you could use a free tool and get instant data aggregation (that would’ve been nice!), so I just entered things into a simple Excel spreadsheet. Then, perhaps a year or so later, I abandoned it because the benefits had started to wane.

Once you get to a certain point, when your expenses are stable and you’ve “optimized” your budget as much as you can, the effort no longer justify the benefits. Today, I do “after-action” type budgeting where I look at my expenses to see if anything is extraordinary or if a certain category has been creeping up (usually it’s the dining out vs. grocery bill categories constantly battling one another). Other than that, I don’t.

How about you?

(Photo by kevincortopassi)

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