Eric Bishop's Webpage

Friends, I want to share some advice on personal finances (hopefully good advice). Trying to increase your income is good, but a much simpler approach to becoming more financially secure is to maintain a detailed budget. This is important regardless of how much money you make, because if you aren’t in control of your spending, you can end up living paycheck-to-paycheck at any income level.

Spending money in the wrong places will keep you from being able to afford whatever is most important to you in life. When you have a budget, you’re forced to confront whether or not your spending conforms to your long term plans, and it encourages you to make sacrifices in areas that are less important.

My strong recommendation for budgeting is to use the website/app YNAB (You Need A Budget). YNAB forces you to take a different approach to budgeting. Instead of budgeting the money you will be making in the future, you only budget money that you currently have. It forces you to give every dollar to your name a specific purpose, even if you don’t plan to spend it immediately – not only does this force you to identify how your money is being spent each month, it also gamifies the process because you get to watch some numbers go up (My type of fun). Budgeting in this way helps you maintain a realistic picture of your finances.

Because YNAB has a learning curve to use properly, I recommend watching this YNAB For Beginners video to get a sense of how to use the platform and set up your budget. It might take a few hours to understand YNAB, link your account, and set up your budget, but to me that is worthwhile as it has helped me save hundreds of dollars each month. The best part is, after your first few weeks on YNAB, the process of maintaining your budget takes less than 5 minutes per day. YNAB is a paid subscription that is about $100 a year. To me that is fairly inconsequential when you consider how much it can save you in the long run. I hope you give it a try and find it to be beneficial the way I have.