The Benefits Of Having A Personal Budget Planner

The Benefits Of Having A Personal Budget Planner

Summary: There are plenty fancy ideas out there for personal budget planners. You can use them on your computer or on handheld devices. They sound like awesome little gadgets except it gives you the idea that owning one will mean youll somehow have tons of extra money. Excel has one of those programs that lets you graph everything out or plot your progress on pie charts. While they seem fancy and look cool, you cant make a silk purse out of a sows ear, as my grandmother used to sa...

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Article Body: There are plenty fancy ideas out there for personal budget planners. You can use them on your computer or on handheld devices. They sound like awesome little gadgets except it gives you the idea that owning one will mean youll somehow have tons of extra money. Excel has one of those programs that lets you graph everything out or plot your progress on pie charts. While they seem fancy and look cool, you cant make a silk purse out of a sows ear, as my grandmother used to say. In other words, if you dont have the money to spend, a fancy budget planner wont help you very much.

I dont think its half as important if you have one of these things than it is to actually use one. Sometimes theyre too complicated than theyre really worth. I personally like the idea of a paper log book, a nice sharp pencil and maybe a calculator. I like the idea of seeing the numbers all work out for myself rather than having a computer do it all for me. The computerized budget planners are too abstract and it makes me nervous not to see the numbers right there.

I have a great brown leather bound budget planner. Its elegant and, for the most part, its easy to use. But Ive decided thats not my real problem when it comes to budgeting. The problem is my taking the time to make use of it. If I slack off, the numbers wont add up and nothing really makes sense. I remember when I was making a ton of money in one of those upstart Internet companies; I didnt think I needed to worry about budgeting. I was definitely living high off the hog, though, and I needed to find a way to get my finances in order. I made a few notations in my personal budget planner and, since I was making so much cash, it didnt take long to catch up and be more financially secure.

Well, as you may imagine, the dot com industry didnt last forever, so I took another position as a systems administrator. I wasnt making as much money and it wasnt a good time for me. I felt like I never had enough money. I thought maybe I wasnt using my budget planner correctly and the bills started stacking up. I lost more than a few nights sleep, worrying about the whole thing. After a while, I realized that my personal budget planner was not at the root of my money problems at all. Rather, I simply wasnt making enough money to keep up with the lifestyle I really wanted to live.

So, I took action and got a second job to make up the difference. It was a boring job but it paid pretty well. I quickly found that my finances were much better and Im back to doing it the way I once did.