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Tips for Improving Your Budget Management

This post comes from a Personal Profitability partner.

Do you often find yourself wondering where your money went? Has it been proving to be such a struggle for you to truly save up and improve your financial situation? Have you been racking your brain trying to determine where the leak in your finances is and how to plug it? 

Budgeting finances can understandably be complex, but it doesn’t have to be. There are many different techniques and apps you can use to help improve your financial management know-how and skills. 

Here are a few simple tips that can get you one step closer to financial maturity. 

Make a Financial Audit

Before you jump into a brand new game plan, you should first try to have a clear understanding of your financial situation. What expenses do you have exactly, and are they recurring? It would help to make a list of all your expected bills and dues on a monthly basis, so you can have a base standard of how much you should have in your account at any given time. 

For credit or loans, make sure to account for the interest rate, and especially the due date. Missing payment deadlines do impact the amount due, so you should do your best not to miss out on any of them. If the option is available, it’s always better to enroll in autopay, which means money will automatically be debit from your linked account to pay your credit or loan through their preferred platform. 

Separate Your Savings

Anything that you will need to pay your monthly dues should be on its own account, and separate from your savings. You can either make the monthly deposit manually or enroll it as an auto-debit with your bank as well. 

The trick is to remove a set amount from your expenses account and your mind. Don’t even think that you have that money to spend–you don’t because it should be sitting nicely in your savings account instead. 

You may start small, but over time, you’d be surprised at how much your savings have already grown, for as long as you don’t keep dipping your hands into it. With an active, growing savings account, you can then look forward to the next step to financial freedom, which is investing. After all, you should only invest money that you can afford to lose. 

Identify Miscellaneous Expenses

It’s easy to overlook miscellaneous expenses as the leak because they don’t seem that much, to begin with. However, it turns out that these “small” expenses do eventually add up. Dining out, for example, can instantly bump up your expenses without you noticing it. The same goes for deliveries and online shopping.

Transportation through cabs and ride-sharing apps also do end up being very expensive, especially since the charges can fluctuate depending on a variety of factors, such as distance and traffic. 

Make a detailed note of all these types of expenses that you usually have. It should be easy to trace back based on your credit card transactions, anyway. Ultimately, the point is for you to see how much these add up to, and how much they actually impact your finances.

Use Technology

At this point, there’s no reason for you not to get the help you need from technology. Once you’re done doing your audit, and since you already have an idea where the financial leak is coming from, it’s time to rectify the situation by staying on top of things. Using budget management apps like Simplifi by Quicken can help you avoid overspending by keeping track of your finances in real-time. 

Budgeting apps only take a simple installation on your phone, so you can check the status of your finances wherever you are. You can even get budget management tips and ideas to further improve your financial literacy. Hopefully, you can finally achieve your savings goals.

This post comes from a Personal Profitability partner.

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Special Contributor
This post comes from a special contributor.
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