.What Do I Want My Money to Do For Me?

What Do I Want My Money to Do For Me?

Posted September 1, 2019 by Ben Carlson

Sometimes branding is everything in life.

Life insurance didn’t take off until they changed the name from death insurance.

Escargot sounds more appealing than eating snails.

Global warming might be more concerning to more people if they called it planetary destruction or something that’s not so warm and fuzzy.

Budgeting probably has the worst branding of any topic in the personal finance realm.

Most people HATE budgeting.

They hate the idea because it feels restrictive. They hate the process because it makes them afraid to admit where are their money is actually going. And they probably hate the word because budgeting doesn’t sound like something that’s fun to try.

It’s also a topic that doesn’t get enough play in the financial advice arena.

There is plenty of advice out there about markets and investing.

There are plenty of blogs about paying down debt and saving money.

There are very few people who give advice about how to spend money.

Most people assume budgeting is about saving money but it’s really about how you choose to spend your money. One of the better books I’ve come across on the topic is You Need a Budget by Jesse Meachum. Jesse does a wonderful job of re-framing the budgeting conversation.

He made three points worth highlighting:

Design your financial life around your priorities. There’s an old adage that personal finance people use that goes something like this: if you want to know where your priorities lie, take a look at your checkbook and your calendar. We might have to update this to say banking app instead of checkbook but you get the idea.

Meachum rightly talks about the importance of prioritizing your spending:

Without a budget you have no way to prioritize your spending. You often don’t even know where your money is truly going. You may stress about not being able to afford what’s important to you while you simultaneously spend on things you’d willingly nix if you could see the trade-offs. That’s the beauty of a (good) budget: it lets you see exactly how your spending affects the rest of your life.

The goal isn’t necessarily to track every expense down to the last penny. But you should have some sort of spending plan that takes into account your priorities, needs, and current financial circumstances.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

 https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2019/09/what-do-i-want-my-money-to-do-for-me/