This is a guest post by Ashley from Everything Finance, a fellow yakezie blog. Everything Finance is a site about just that, everything related to finance. You can get information about investing, saving money, shopping, blogging, and making money online. If you like what you see here, make sure to stop by or better yet subscribe to their feed so you don’t miss a thing.
With budgets becoming more strained as economic times become more stressful everyone from your neighbor down the street to your favorite corporation is doing one of 2 things and they are increasing earnings or cutting cost.
Generally it is much easier to cut cost than it is to increase earning so many people automatically gravitate to that method, but the way to handle things is to find a balance between both of these methods. It is always a good time to increase your earnings, and I am sure that we all have some fat that we could trim to make our finances leaner and meaner to help us achieve our goals.
Finding ways to earn more money
It is not as hard as you may think to find ways to make more money and boost your income. There are multiple things you may do to boost your income such as taking on odd jobs, or simply asking for a raise on your day job. You may be surprised if you can justify why you deserve it, you may just get it.
There are many positive aspects to earning more such as having more money to spend or put towards your financial goals, but one of the major downsides is that people tend to spend more money as they make more money. Earning more money is only a plus if it truly adds a net positive influence on your finances.
This can simply be measured in terms of if you are moving closer at a more rapid rate to your financial goals than your were before your starting earning more money. There are also other factors to take into account such as if you are losing more money to taxes than you have a net benefit from generating more income.
Finding fat to cut within your budget
We all have fat that we can cut within our budgets. It is not a matter of if we have fat within our budget, but how much. There are always things we can cut from our budgets that are rather wasteful, or we can truly live without. Just take some time to sit back and truly analyze your monthly, weekly, and daily spending.
Do you really need all of those premium cable channels? Have you considered contacting your cable company to perhaps getting them at a discount? Do you really need a $5 coffee to get you started in the morning? These are just some of the easy things to point out, but I’m pretty sure we all have our own sacred cows that we don’t want to let go, but are black holes in our budget.
Finding a Balance
The best way to move towards aggressive financial growth is to use a combination of increasing your income and finding fat and waste in your budget to cut out. You could literally create a couple hundred dollars from your already existing efforts to use to help you achieve your financial goals.
How would you increase your income or what would you cut from your budget to have some extra cash?
My Thought: Ashley presented the very basics of personal finance, earn more and spend less and finding a balance. I wrote earlier about this aspect. You should not go overboard on earning more money or cutting back on budget. Your hard work deserves occasional treat or reward and at the same time you should not reward your self too much.
You should also set time aside for your family and friends, do not just work to earn money all the time and make saving a fun activity, rather than cutting back on every thing you cherish.
| Thank you for reading this article. If you like my blog, consider subscribing to One Cent at a Time via RSS or email. You can also subscribe via Facebook or Twitter by clicking on those icons on the top. You can also pint it! |
[...] Continue reading here: Personal Finance Basic, Finding Balance Between Earning and … [...]
[...] Original post: Personal Finance Basic, Finding Balance Between Earning and … [...]
My thoughts exactly! Be happy, not miserable! I’m glad to get rid of cable, but I might splurge on some other things. Finding the balance is the key.
Actually Ashley’s thoughts matches with mine too
You only get one whack at life! You should enjoy, but that doesn’t have to cost a bunch of money….
And best things in life are free. We are here to write about getting fun at nominal costs, isn’t it?
I couldn’t agree more. Finding ways to save money on the things that don’t matter and spending on the things that do is a great way to find balance. For us we enjoy traveling and a nice house so we sacrifice on other things like brand name clothing and a fancy car.
Its personal finance after all miss T.
Balance is very important since extreme anything is very difficult to maintain.
you can’t go wrong KC, do you?
This is a more challenging topic than one might think… in theory, easy to discuss but in practice, extremely difficult to do. I’d suggest to anyone wanting to manage their finances better to begin by keeping track of what they spend. Then you can see first hand where your money is going… and make choices.
very systematic approach, observe, analyse and then implement. Good advice doctor
I like the “cut the fat” analogy, especially since I write about food and fitness a lot. Cutting fat — especially ‘bad fat’ from both your actual plate and your spending diet is essential for good physical and financial health.
Excellent analogy between food and finance. Great comment.
Oh, findng balance is my weak point. I try to, but sometimes life takes over and thing happen and I just need to treat myself.
And then my budget goes out of window. 
You can see Doctor stock’s comment above. Start by observing your spending first things will fall in place gradually.
I agree that finding balance is the key. As long as you spend less than you earn, you’re already ahead of so many people. If you have a financial goal like saving for a house down payment, then keep working toward it and you should do fine.
Finding balance with money in a relationship is all that more challenging, but more satisfying too.
Isn’t finding a healthy balance true about most things in life? Each of us needs to decide what our own personal and financial goals are and then determine how to get there. Sometimes that means career change or adjusting our goals. Thanks for sharing this!
[...] rate? BOTH of course!!” Not much else needs to be said.SB from One Cent At A Time presents Personal Finance Basic, Finding Balance Between Earning and Spending, and says, “This article reiterates the very basic fundamental aspect of personal finance, [...]
[...] from One Cent At A Time presents Personal Finance Basic, Finding Balance Between Earning and Spending, and says, “This essay reiterates a unequivocally elementary elemental aspect of personal [...]