YNAB 3.0: Second Look

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In January, I put up a long review of the newest version of YNAB, being fairly disappointed in how it stacked up to other alternatives I was using at the time, like Mvelopes. Knowing how to create a budget was a good start, but I needed the right tool to help me make my plan [...]

YNAB 3 Review: Give Me Back My Mvelopes

My final review of the new You Need a Budget 3 software and how it compares to my previous envelope budgeting manager of choice: Mvelopes.

5 Essential Money Lessons From 2009

I take a look at some of the financial lessons of 2009 that were essential for our family to learn, and wish you a happy and healthy New Year!

Putting Together Your Personal Profit and Loss Table

The third component of applying business plans to personal finance–the profit and loss table. See how you can benefit!

Using Life Roles to Organize Your Budget

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Organizing your priorities and your time by life roles is very useful – how about applying the same principles to your financial life? Here’s how I did it.

Identifying Needs Versus Wants in Your Budget

One of the biggest struggles with budgeting is understanding the difference between needs and wants. Although we all understand this intuitively, here’s a 5-category system to make things crystal clear.

Why I Use an Envelope Budget

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Four reasons why I use an envelope budget – paradigm shift, savings goals, irregular expenses, and eliminating guess work. Includes a free e-book from the makers of Mvelopes.

How to Set Up Your First Successful Budget – Part III (Tracking & Review)

This is the last post in my three-part series on budgeting basics. I will wrap up the series by discussing strategies for tracking and reviewing your new budget to ensure that it’s working for you in the way you planned. If you’ve completed Parts I & II of this task, you should have a good [...]

Hungry for Spending? 8 Reasons to Try a Cash-Only Diet

About 6 months ago to the day, my wife and I made the decision that money was leaking out in too many places. We couldn’t plug the holes because we couldn’t find them. We needed a quick method of understanding where our money was going without having to stare at long reports. That’s when we [...]

How to Set Up Your First Successful Budget – Part II (Organizing and Setup)

This post is the second in a three-part series about setting up and maintaining a successful budget. Last week, we discussed what a budget was, how it could be beneficial (or practically essential) to reaching your financial goals, and the research that needed to be completed before we continued with Budgeting 101. The three parts [...]

7 Ways to Stop Eating Out From Killing Your Budget

If there was ever a statistic about why modern budgets fail again and again, I am certain that eating out would be on the list, if not the leading act! More than any other habit of the modern American family, eating out is positively the worst thing you can do for your financial and physical [...]

How to Set Up Your First Successful Budget – Part I (Understanding and Research)

Since the beginning of time, mankind has understood that the spending power money holds must be controlled and channeled to appropriate uses if we are to (at the very least) survive, and (hopefully) achieve our lifetime financial goals. To do this, all of us need to create a budget. Because of money’s finite qualities, each [...]

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