My review: I found it impossible to trim my needs bucket down to 50%. “So you’ll end up going over with your needs and not having enough for the other categories.” “For places with higher costs of living like New York, New Jersey, or California, housing alone can eat up 35 or 40 percent of your budget,” says Giardino. But its feasibility depends on where you live. It’s straightforward and easy to grasp, since every expense fits neatly into a category. What the experts say: The 50/30/20 is a go-to for many financial planners. Who it’s best suited for: People with fairly stable monthly incomes and expenses. You need to divvy up your take-home pay into buckets: 50% goes toward needs (housing, car payments, groceries, insurance, student loan payments and other debt minimums), 30% toward wants (trips, dining out, entertainment, gadgets, etc.), and 20% toward savings (retirement, emergency funds, and debt payments above minimums). You’ll need a spreadsheet or a budgeting app, such as Mint or You Need a Budget, for this one because it involves tracking and doing some math. How it works : You think about your budget in buckets according to a hierarchy of importance. Here are five of the most popular budgeting techniques touted by professionals-and how they fared in our testing. “The most important thing is that you pick a strategy that really resonates with you.” The more comfortable you are with that strategy, you’re more likely to implement it and stick with it. “Everybody’s different,” says Greg Giardino, a Tarrytown, N.Y.-based certified financial planner. One thing they stressed: There’s no one-size-fits-all budgeting solution. My main objective with my money is to make sure I’m taking care of my expenses while also saving for a down payment on a house.įor help, I turned to certified financial planners. I’m a married 30-something with no children who lives in New York City. But that can be a time-consuming process, so we put the most popular budgeting methods through our testing process over several weeks to see which ones work best for a regular person. To sort out which type of budget might work best for you, and if you need a budget at all, can take some experimentation. There are just about as many approaches to handling your daily finances as there are to counting calories. Trying to get your spending under control? Just like with dieting, it can help to add some structure by following a plan, especially if your budget is likely to be bigger because of inflation, as The Wall Street Journal newsroom has advised.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |