Budgeting: What Is It And Why?

Make saving money easy by providing yourself with an accurate estimate of your expenses. Budgeting can help you not only to save money, but also to prevent wasteful or unnecessary spending.

What is Budgeting?

While it may seem like a waste of time and effort, budgeting is a way to provide yourself with an accurate list of necessary expenses to determine based off your daily outcome, how much you can reasonably spend.

A simple monthly spreadsheet of expenses can open up your eyes to some of your costly habits. For example, a weekly coffee visits of $6 dollars seems reasonable, but that's $30 dollars each month, and $312 dollars each year. Combined with the cost of restaurants, snacks or food purchases and you begin to run into problems.

Why Budget?

Budgeting is often overlooked, but college students especially could really benefit from this method. Budgeting isn't just to save money, but to prevent you from limiting yourself. For example, skipping meals so you can afford a new winter coat might be preventable by dropping a monthly subscription to something you don't use. Budgeting assesses these necessities' and gives you alternate ways to handle situations such as this one.

Resources You Can Use To Start On Your Budgeting Journey

Easy Budgeting Apps:

PocketGuard: a free app that connects to your cards and accounts to pick out recurring patterns or expenses and gives you an estimated "allowance" of what you can reasonably spend. A quick and virtually effortless way to maintain a budget.
Mint: Another app that monitors your expenses and tracks bills to help you cut costs in your daily life.
Everydollar: This app requires a manual input of your expenses, and therefore requires a little bit more effort, but will help your expenses in the long run.