A 3-Step Organizational Plan to manage your money

Our simple budgeting process grew out of necessity. As the 17th Century Irish Poet, George Farquhar, said, "Necessity, the mother of invention".

When I started graduate school shortly after getting married, my wife got a job to "put me through school." We soon discovered there was "too much month and not enough money." We needed help! Luckily my wife was able to find a better paying job. But this cloud also had a silver lining. We discovered a very simple way to manage our money which we call the 3-STEP PLAN. We have used this ever since with great success.

Here is a very simplified version of our money management system:

1. List your income.
2. List your bills.
3. Subtract to calculate your extra, spendable cash.

I know this sounds way oversimplified. However, I am surprised at how many people I talk to who have never taken the time to do this simple process and are constantly in financial trouble. A little organizing of their finances using this 3-Step Plan could help them a lot.

There are of course many variables to these three steps. I will expand on our budget organization process over the next few days. So check back for further explanation of our budget system.

By the way, while searching for the author of the first quote above, I ran across a handy site to find quotes. There you can search for over 300,000 quotes by over 20,000 authors. Some people have taken the time to organize quotes for us. How nice!