Personal Finance Basic, Finding Balance Between Earning and Spending

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.