From the category archives:

Budget

Sinking Funds: taking Budgeting to the Next Level

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Boring!!! Okay it might be but it’s a really important tool for your personal finance arsenal.  In the business world a sinking fund is the act of setting aside funds over a time period to pay off debts or acquire assets.  That models well to personal finance so we’ll assume you’ve got your basic monthly  […]

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Cash Envelope Budgeting: Why Your Bank Hates It

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In a recent article by the New York Times they estimate that Banks will make over $27 Billion dollars off of consumers overdrafts from checks and debit cards. Let’s just say that you are expecting a $400 check to be deposited on Friday, it’s Friday so you go out to lunch with your coworkers $13.65, […]

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How to Run Your Personal Finances Like a Fortune 500 Company

I’ve spent over half of my professional career working for a Fortune 100 company and have had the dubious role of managing budgets north of 100 Million dollars. While I would be careful to apply anything to do with big business to my personal life there are certainly lessons you can learn for dealing with […]

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Take the Small Wins with Your Money and Your Life

This picture shows a note I found very humorous from my 8 year old son that he left for himself at the breakfast table.  Then the more I thought about it I began to feel sad that he was talking to himself this way and was getting down on himself because he couldn’t remember to […]

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Credit: The Lazy Person's Budgeting Tool

I want to share a cautionary tale of a shady past filled with overdraft credit lines, a myriad of checking accounts and an income that was allowed to trickle into cracks, crevaces, bookstores, eating establishments and hardware stores. The moral of today’s story: Credit is not a replacement for sound financial planning and budgeting.

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Are You Fiscally Negligent? Did Netflix Cancel You Because You Never Swapped Movies?

I’ve done a variety of things to sabotage my own budget so much so that I wanted to share them here as not really savings tips but more like financial penalty avoidance (FPA). When you look at the potential expenses you could literally save hundreds a year by avoiding these traps so take this as an opportunity to learn from my mistakes or celebrate our financial failures together.

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Zero Based Budget Part 3 The New Beginning

Welcome back to our conversation regarding Zero Based Budgeting.  This will conclude our series and we’ll cover some of the tools you can leverage to help you with your budgeting life. I personally use You Need a Budget and it has helped immeasurably to keep our family on the same page with our finances and […]

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Zero Based Budget System Part 2

In part 1 of our series we talked about the high level aspects of budgeting, let’s get under the hood a little more and look at some real world examples and tools for making your life infinitely easier. But first I would like to talk a minute about communication. “Dude FiscalGeek what’s your problem, give me the […]

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A Zero Based Budgeting System

Zero Based Budgeting

I honestly believe if you could pick only one personal finance tool to take with you on a desert island it would be the zero based budget. Why would you need a budget on a desert island? I don’t have time for these ridiculous questions. We’ve got some learning to do. There is tremendous power in budgeting, glamorous no, empowering, yes!

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