I struggled with my weight for years after college. A few years back, I started documenting the food I ate with My Fitness Pal. After just a few days, I knew why I was getting chubby. I was eating too much! Much more than I realized…

So budgeting is to fiscal fitness what the food diary is to physical fitness. When I tracked it, I realized how much I was eating, and my diet improved. Similarly, when we track our spending with a written budget, we get a handle on where we may be wasting money.

It was a learning process, but we figured it out through trial and error in about 3 months. Our monthly budget meeting and my nerdy Excel record-keeping pinpointed the leaks in our cash flows.

We were sick of managing our money based on hunches and hope. Hope budgeting didn’t work. But more importantly, we hated that pit-in-the-stomach feeling that happened when we’d find there is too much month left at the end of the money.

Budgeting is just telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. Just like the food diary, the budget tells our money how it will be consumed. And we do it on paper on purpose each month.

Budgeting is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. Share on X

But I’m a spreadsheet nerd I can do more with a spreadsheet. If you’d like help creating a budget spreadsheet, call or text 570-731-0425 for a done-for-you spreadsheet cash flow plan. Or consider downloading my blank spreadsheet here.