Once you’ve embraced the realities of the budgeting process, you’re ready to start getting into the nitty-gritty numbers.

To get ready for this new, ongoing task, Janine and Henry schedule weekly time to go over their budget together. Going into your brand new budget with the acknowledgement that you are committing to a regular and ongoing process will help you maintain your budget, which is far more important than just creating one. Like money management, your laundry is an ongoing responsibility that cannot be avoided, ignored or forgotten without some serious consequences. Instead of thinking of budgeting as a one-time or occasional chore, it’s better to think of it as a regular maintenance task, much like doing your laundry. The best way to set yourself up for budgeting success is to embrace the fact that budgeting is the ongoing strategy you will use to live the financial life you want. Eventually, it got to the point where they had to sit down to create a budget again and start the whole process anew. They didn’t understand why they were still struggling to make ends meet. After creating their first budget, the couple was not actively tracking their spending, so they didn’t notice when they had blown past their self-imposed restaurant spending limit. If this is what you think of as budgeting, it’s very tough to actually get ahead, as Janine and Henry learned. So they vowed to spend no more than $50 a week at restaurants-and went on their merry way feeling good that they’d made a budget. Let’s look at an example, using a composite couple, “Henry” and “Janine.” The first time Janine and Henry tried to make a budget, they realized they had dropped over $450 the previous month on dining out. You plan for how much you will spend in the future.

You figure out how much you have been spending. You sit down with your accounts and receipts. We often tend to think of budgeting as a one-and-done kind of chore.

Simple budget form