Budgeting Is So Boring. Start 2024 Right by Giving It Up for Good

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Instead of making a budget, just cap your fixed expenses. Here’s what else you can do to make your life a lot easier. 

Many people do not budget their money. As many as 65% of Americans have no idea how much they even spent over the course of the prior month, much less a clear spending plan and a detailed analysis of whether they stick to spending limits.

If you don’t have a budget of your own, it’s understandable why that would be the case. Budgeting is boring. It takes a long time to write out a plan for where your money should go. And, often, you won’t stick to that plan anyway since life gets in the way and tracking every dollar just isn’t enjoyable.

The good news is, you can give up budgeting forever in 2024 and not hurt your personal finances. You just need to do a few things instead. Here’s what they are.

Keep your fixed expenses reasonable

If you don’t want to budget, one of the best things to do is to make sure your fixed expenses are reasonable. These are the expenses that don’t change each month. You have to pay them because they are things like your mortgage or rent payment.

The lower you can keep your fixed expenses, the more money you’ll have left over for the kind of discretionary spending you’d ordinarily have to budget for. Typically, fixed expenses should take up no more than 50% of your income. But the lower you can go, the easier it is to make your spending work without planning where each dollar goes.

Let’s say you bring home $5,000 a month. If you keep your fixed expenses at 30% of your income, you’d have $3,500 left over for everything else, compared to $2,500 if you limited fixed expenses to 50% or $1,500 if your fixed expenses took up 70% of your income.

If you only have $2,500 or $1,500, you have to be a lot more careful about what you buy — and most likely would have to make a budget to make everything work. If you have a lot more money left over, then this isn’t as much of a concern.

Automate your savings and bill payments

Once you’ve taken care of limiting your fixed expenses, the next step is to automate your savings. Typically, you want to save about 20% of your income. This is for things like retirement but also short-term and medium-term goals like building an emergency fund and saving for a house or vehicle.

You should have money transferred right from your bank account to your retirement or savings accounts automatically each month. That way, you’ll know for sure you’re saving enough, even without having to budget to do it.

You can also set up automatic payments for all of your bills so your money will go where it should.

Once you’ve done that, then you’ll know everything you have remaining in your checking account is for spending. If you’ve kept your fixed expenses reasonable, you should have plenty left over to cover the things you need and want, and you won’t have to make a detailed budget to figure out what to do with the money — you can just enjoy spending it.

Give this a try if you dislike budgeting so you can see if this approach will work for you. It’s a lot more fun, and it may just work better since you can enjoy your money while also ensuring you’re on track toward hitting your financial goals.

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