Clever Budgeting Strategies - Streamline Your Budget And Stay On Target!

When it comes to budgeting, you may need to be crafty in order to “outwit yourself.” Managing your finances could get as tricky as shadowboxing, especially as your opponent is, well, yourself. So when you want to create a way to cut corners to make your budget stick, you would have to resort to different “tricks” just to get to your goal: A perfectly-followed budget. Given that you've already come to terms with the fact that you need a budget.

When there's just too much to buy or spend on, and seemingly just not enough of your resources to fill in those needs, you could do any of these things:

• Cut back on quantities of your budget's items.
• Cut out the items altogether.
• Substitute the items for a cheaper brand, though of a similar quality.
• Schedule the purchases of your items.

Purchasing things on a schedule is a concept that you may prove effective for streamlining your budget. Most of the time, we try to cram everything we want and need into our monthly budgets, only to find out when the budget is done, that we have just too many items at the end of our incomes. This is where wisdom should come in, in budgeting.

A lot of the time, we would need to deny ourselves of what we were used to; and if we cannot afford to reduce the quantities of the items we consume, much less cut these items out of our lives completely, scheduling the purchases of the items on your budget may be the strategy that could work for you.

So, how do you start? For example, in the past months, you've always purchased 10 18-egg cartons, every month, to make up a breakfast for 3, of two eggs per person, among other foodstuff, for 30 days. However, you noticed that these eat up a good part of your budget that you could actually free up. So if you're not amenable to cutting down to, say, only 6 18-egg cartons a month (cutting back on quantities), you may want to buy the full 10 cartons of 18 eggs per carton every other month instead (scheduling your purchases).

If your stocks of eggs run out before the month is over, buy only what would last up until the end of the month. Also, try to substitute what you usually buy with a cheaper brand, if possible. Now this is incorporating another budget strategy: substitution.

To cut corners more effectively, you may want to try living without all those eggs, switching to a cheaper brand altogether, or looking for other, cheaper, healthier food items to have instead of eggs. You may also want to enlist your family's help in cutting corners. Ration the eggs, if need be. Or serve your family with smaller portions.

This principle could also apply to other items that we may feel like we can never live without. There are so many things that we think are needs: paper towels, kleenex, even toilet paper. And these, while seeming to be needs, could actually turn out to be mere luxuries. Maybe you can try using cloth towels for your dishes; try being more mindful of how you use your kleenex: no wiping of table surfaces or what-not with kleenex, use these only for the sniffles; and for t.p., you may want to try getting a bidet, if, over a 10-year period, it could prove to be cheaper than buying 20 rolls of toilet paper every month.

When we try to live without certain things that we think are "needs," we may find out that these aren't needs after all, but luxuries. Figure out what items in your budget add up to significant expenses in a month, like the "occasional" Friday night pizza (which you may have been buying every week, actually), the tubs of ice cream you keep buying every other day, or whatever else that turns out to eat a big chunk of your expenses. When you pinpoint these sneaky budget-killing culprits, try cutting back, scheduling when to buy them and stick to that schedule, or if you want to try an extreme method of disciplining yourself and your family, try living without these items for a whole month. If you can survive the whole month without these things, it's clear that you don't need these on your budget.

Stack up your reasons for minimizing your purchases, by citing different reasons why you should:

• Switch brands
• Cut back on quantities
• Schedule your purchase of these items
• Cut these out of your budget altogether

Possible Reasons You Could Use:

• Find out the health reasons why you should not even include these in your budget, or at least just cut down your consumption of these
• If there are quality issues about the more expensive brands, find out about them and use these to rationalize switching to more affordable brands
• Give yourself "pep talks" with 10 reasons why a fatter bank account would make it worth it for you to have a hollower fridge and a flatter belly
• Give yourself 20 reasons why a basic cellphone plan is much, much better than the ultimate plan. One of which is that you know, deep in your heart, that you will never get to use even 1/4 of its data and free minutes
  
• Whatever other reasons that would help discourage you from keeping these items in your budget.

When you stack up the reasons for you to cut back, cut out, or schedule the purchases of these items, you'd be better able to convince yourself to, as mentioned, cut back, cut out, or schedule the purchases of these things. Rationalizing in favor of your budget (and against tolerating your "need" of these stuff) would help your resolve to be more financially disciplined.

So, what's the point of all this discipline, if budgeting and cutting corners is not an end in itself? Why, eventually putting your savings into a high yield savings account, of course! And if you want to up the ante further, you may want to invest in stocks. Tradeking is a good place to start. But before you get to these big targets, you do have to make the baby steps by getting your budget down pat, first.

But hey, don't go and be a teetotaler on yourself, in honor of your budget! Once a month, do try and let your hair down, and have a whole 8-slice New York Pizza. ONCE A MONTH, as scheduled. Rewards like these come a long way; they sure make disciplining yourself with your budget A LOT more worthwhile. Happy budgeting!

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If you want to learn whether you can keep your current lifestyle if you live on a budget, click here.