Periodically, it’s good to review expenses that you’re paying out of habit more than necessity, things that you’ve stopped thinking of as optional. For me, one of those things was my monthly expenditures on movie rentals.
Now that you’ve had plenty of time* to consider parts 1 through 4, let’s do a wrap-up of the basics for budgeting.
As the tagline of this site says, “manage the flow and you’ll be able to weather any storm.” Budgeting is the primary tool for managing the flow of money in your life. In Part 1, we saw where the money is flowing in (your income). In Part 2, we looked at where it was flowing away (your expenses). Part 3 was the opportunity to create and /or examine any holding ponds (savings) and Part 4 was where you purposely diverted the flow in order to create growth elsewhere (giving). Know that money will flow through your life whether you’re managing it or not. However, taking the time to plan where the flow goes results in you holding onto more of it and having it be there where you need it.