I once heard a budget is like a diet, no one stays on one for long. If you have any debt at all, you are spending more than you earn. That is the first thing you have to stop. We tried to simplify this by coming up with with our Runaway Checkbook program. It is an online tool. It's simple, you enter in your income and fixed expenses from the last 12 months (takes about 2 hours), and the online spending planner will tell you how much is left for discretionary spending on a weekly basis. As long as you don't spend more than that amount, then you are living within your income. The planner automatically builds in "fat" so that you will rarely have a fixed expense that exceeds the planned amount. The key to our tool is to enter in your actual fixed expenses for the last 12 months. Treat savings and loan payments as fixed expenses. Go to our site (runawayfinances.com) and download the book for free to understand the basics and view the video to get a feel for how the online spending planner works.
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