You might not know this about me, but I have one of those coffee machines. You know, the one with the capsules and the George Clooney commercials. Neither very good for the budget or the environment (although I do send the capsules back for recycling). I like it a lot!
Many people associate the thing of living on a budget as living a life where you have to say no to most things. A life where everything fun and extravagant has no place. I don’t necessarily agree.
A budget is really not about saying no. A budget is actually about saying yes. Yes to the things that you want to be a part of your everyday life and that are important to you and your family.
The Budget is like a picture in a frame! Or actually, like a collage of many small pictures placed in a frame, adding up to one big picture. The frame is our income and the picture is all our expenses added up. The frame has to hold the picture in place and cannot therefore be smaller than the picture(s) inside the frame, meaning that the total of your expenses cannot be bigger than the total of your income.
Since it is our frame, we have the power to decide what pictures we want to be in it and what size each of them has. And because that we are all different people with different priorities, needs and wants, the picture for each and every one of us will look different from other another. And that is how it is supposed to be. It shows that we all have a lot to say about how we want to live life financially.
It is important to remember that most of us can’t have it all. So we have to choose – what is most important to us and what could we also do without? And for that we have to know what our expenses really are. So my tip would be: Start tracking your expenses and then you can start to make decisions of whether or not your money are going to the places you want them to go. If they don’t, start making changes!
Keep in mind that all of our expenses, whether big or small, are a result of our choices and can therefore also be a subject to change, even if it very small.
And about the coffee machine? That is a totally conscious choice from our part. Not because that we have to have it but because we want to have it (and made the right choices and changes to be able to!).
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