Michelle Loretta, owner of mmm… paper, runs a great blog site at Sage Wedding Pros. Her blog site is a resource for wedding professionals who want to have smarter businesses. She also has an affinity for personal and business financial planning.
She was kind enough to give BudgetSketch® a look and posted a very nice endorsement on her blog while writing about proper budgeting the easy way.
Read her excellent post here: Easy Peasy Budgeting
Thanks Michelle for the honorable mention!!
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. OK, so I’m mixing my metaphors or actually literary works in this case but the bug that’s been going around finally got around to me. “The flu?” you ask. If only… Nope. I’ve got a full blown case of pink slip-itis!
No, I didn’t fire myself as the president of Finagilous. As perhaps you already know, Finagilous was formed to create BudgetSketch®. Along with a small team I have been pouring money and sweat into the effort on as near a full-time basis as I could manage over the past year. I was, until recently, financing my business development passion via a “steady” day job.
“So what’s all this best and worst of times non-sense?” you ask. Well, it couldn’t have happened at a better or worse time. Better because my position was eliminated a month away from the formal launch of BudgetSketch® leaving me plenty of excuses not to be pounding the pavement looking for work so I can work overtime on BudgetSketch®. “And the worst of times?” you press. Have you picked up a newspaper lately?! There hasn’t been a worse time to be unemployed in 75 years.
“And this pertains to budgeting how?” you follow. Well, first, I’m glad my wife and I had begun getting our financial house in order a couple years ago or my job loss might have put us over the edge. Next, we know exactly how much cash we need to get by each month because we’ve got a budget. Finally, when all else fails, we’ve got an emergency fund. All the product of having a sound financial plan, AKA “a budget”.
Perhaps the biggest lesson is that you never know what lies around the next bend in the road, especially in trying times like these. So it is wisest to be prepared. Not having a plan is not being prepared. Are you prepared? I hope you don’t have to find out the way I found out but life’s little twists and turns have a way of highlighting your preparedness, or unpreparedness!
“Ask not for whom the bell tolls?” It tolled for me!
No matter what your passion, if your aim is to help others who are struggling with the same issues you are, one of your toughest challenges will be to convince others to abandon the fruitless practices that you had difficulty abandoning yourself.
For decades, every attempt I made to gain control of my finances started out by tracking my past expenses. Therefore, I was not surprised to discover the Where’s My Money Going? Month series of blog posts on the Finance for a Freelance Life blog which encourages its readers to join in the expense tracking fun.
First, please do not interpret this as an attack on the Finance for a Freelance Life (FfaFL) blog. You will find much helpful information there and I encourage you to check it out. For those of you familiar with Dave Ramsey, I love his concept of free spirits and nerds. Now, this may shock some of you, but bloggers tend to be a pretty nerdy bunch which is probably the genesis of FfaFL’s rather nerdy tendencies of expense tracking. Hey, you don’t think any of us free spirits could even conceive of such a practice, do you?!
The habit that I would like to break among those struggling to gain control of their finances is this notion that expense tracking is somehow linked to budgeting. After decades of blind obedience to that school of thought it occurred to me that trying to control where my money was going by tracking expenses is about as effective as trying to lead a horse by its tail. What I finally learned was that the only thing knowing where my money was going did for me was confirm something that should already have been painfully obvious to me, I’m lousy at managing money!
I knew there had to be a better way and I figured it would likely start with walking around to the other end of the horse and picking up the reins. Why not do the budget first?! Yes, I’m serious. In decades of financial futility it had never occurred to me that the best place to start was with a detailed, financial plan, AKA a budget.
Why does budgeting first work? Because it puts you in control. You know your income. You know your obligations. You decide who gets paid how much and when. Then tracking expenses becomes trivial because you spend what you planned to spend IF you’re disciplined. Tell your money where to go and you’ll never wonder again where it went.
As if the Where’s My Money Going? Month series wasn’t a big enough set-up, this month’s posts include some very insightful reviews of the current generation of expense tracking apps. I’ve tried most of the apps covered in the review, and many more that were not. The bottom line is though that every attempt I made to gain control of my finances by tracking expenses failed no matter how slick the tool was that I was using to track them.
Even though many of these apps has a “budgeting” component, no two seem to share the same concept of what a budget is and most of them should be renamed “spending goal” or “spending target” components.
That is why Dewayne and I created BudgetSketch® to be a laser focused budget creation tool. We built it debt free, just like we hope to be one day, with no fluff, no ads, and no cost. If you’re ready to take control of your financial future, if you’re fed up with wondering where your money is going, AND TIRED OF TRACKING EXPENSES, why not give BudgetSketch® a try?
If you are reading this blog, I am sure you are convinced (or maybe almost) that the path to financial happiness doesn’t include living as Dave Ramsey coins, “Debt People”.
Developing an effective budget is the place to start, and of course I am going to recommend BudgetSketch® as the best tool to use, but what about practical advice on how to lower your cost of living?
While there are many ways to save money and plenty of resources to teach you how to improve your financial situation, here are 10 quality ideas to get you started!
1. Setup your budget using BudgetSketch® .
After all… you gotta get started with one and you might as well use the best tool you can! 
2. Cut little luxuries during the workweek.
It’s just a cup of fancy coffee. But at $2.75 per day, it comes to more than $700 per year. Lunch out? At $8 a day, you’ll spend around $2,000 a year. A travel mug and brown bag never looked so good.
3. Don’t use so much gasoline.
Break out the bike. Carpool. Or try public transportation. You could save hundreds or even thousands of dollars — and reduce your impact on the environment.
4. Get a grip on credit.
Pay off your credit cards. And pay monthly balances in full. Say you owed $1,500 on an 18 percent interest credit card, and you paid $75 per month. If you stopped using the card, it would take 24 months to pay off at a cost of $1,800. That’s $300 in interest. Also, choose your card wisely. Look for no-annual-fee cards with low rates and benefits such as money back or frequent-flier miles.
5. Stick with water.
When you eat out, skip the wine and drinks. It’s where restaurants make most of their money, and where you’ll blow a big piece of your budget. Save the glass of wine for when you get home.
6. Freeze an extra meal.
When cooking, make an extra pan of food and freeze it. Then when you’re not in the mood to cook, you can pull a homemade meal from the freezer. It saves you the cost of carryout, and it can be healthier.
7. Pack the snack.
For family outings to a museum, zoo or park, bring your own snacks and drinks. You’ll save a lot of money without missing any of the fun. You’ll also have a healthier day.
8. Share tools to save.
Collectively buy tools with your neighbors, friends or family. Follow the example of five Boston neighbors who bought a snowblower at low cost, and then turned winter storms into parties.
9. Get real with your budget.
Take the time to figure out your monthly expenses. Know what your disposable income is. Pay off debt. Decide what kind of spending gives you the greatest pleasure and cut out other luxuries.
10. Be sale savvy.
Buy clothes at the end of the season. Watch for furniture sales. Comparison shop on the Internet. And remember, you often can negotiate non-sale items.
Items 2 – 9 courtesy of P&G Everyday Solutions
Don’t get me wrong. The folks who created Wesabe are a very intelligent bunch but when I read a recent post on their blog, “Budgeting is hard. Don’t bother!” I have to wonder how much confidence they have in the intelligence of their user base. To be fair, the folks over at Wesabe are attempting to leverage what we believe is a flawed perception to attract new users and there is nothing wrong with that, EXCEPT that part about the “flawed perception.”
We certainly hope there is a flawed perception about budgeting being hard because we’ve built a business on the premise that budgeting need not be hard! In fact, if you give BudgetSketch a try we think you’ll find that budgeting is quite easy, almost trivial, and believe me, if I can create a budget, anyone can!
So, why do those bright folks over at Wesabe think that budgeting is hard? We believe they’re misinterpreting what budgeting is. In fact, this is the chief obstacle we’ve faced introducing our product to the general public. Most folks, even the learned ones, seem to confuse budgeting with accounting. We’ll give you the fact that accounting can be hard but budgeting? Really?!
To quote the blog post and their definition of budgeting, “you’re being asked to give a precise, to-the-penny guess for your lunch spending for each of the next 12 months”. Well, if you think budgeting is what the folks at Wasabe call budgeting, then have we got good news for you! Budgeting is about intent, not fact. Your budget should reflect what you intend to spend. Your budget will never tell you exactly what you are going to spend on bubble gum 12 months from now. Your checkbook will tell you what you actually spent. How hard is that?
The Wesabe post was meant to trumpet improvements to their features called “spending targets”, which is about as close as Wesabe comes to actual budgeting. I suppose you could create a budget within Wesabe so long as all your spending, every month, fell into one spending target or another but as we all know, budgets change from one month to the next and a target isn’t something you’ll want to move too much.
Using BudgetSketch you can create and maintain a detailed, monthly spending plan (AKA “a budget”) in ten minutes, and BudgetSketch will soon be introducing a goals system that will permit you to assign surplus income to specific financial goals, such as “Buy a new washer & dryer” or “Save for the Emergency Fund”. Hey, don’t take our word for it. Try BudgetSketch and prove to yourself just how easy budgeting can be.
