Hello, whinabbers. My name is Jesse Meekum, and this is podcast number 27 for you need a budget. We teach you four rules to help you stop living paycheck to

paycheck, get out of debt and save more money.

Today, I want to talk about what for me would perhaps be the ideal budget. You have to kind of ask yourself what is ideal, what really

matters with budgeting? Why do we do it in the first place? The reason I do it is because when I'm aware,

and budgeting increases awareness, when I'm planning, planning is budgeting. When I'm doing those things my money is lined up with my values.

That's where I find financial contentment. Not in the amount of money earned, but in what the money does once it's in my pocket and when

those values are aligned you're content.

So an ideal budget for me would be that it does not hinder that contentment, that it promotes it.

I feel ever more content with my situation.

So an ideal budget for me would be something where I didn't have to manage it very often.

I didn't have to check a lot of things and it was fairly high level.

The higher the level, the better but not if you're having a hard time managing things. So you

have kind of a seesaw approach you know on one hand you say well I'm doing really

really poorly and I need to track everything and I would say absolutely track

everything you are doing poorly and doing that tracking will write the ship.

On the other hand, if you're doing very well, if you've ingrained habits over years and years of budgeting,

being aware, doing that planning, being on the same page with your spouse,

my hope would be that you could start to kind of back off of the tedium to the extent possible. So that's the direction I'm headed. I want to be able to do

less budgeting and get the exact same result.

So an ideal budget for me would mean that I have very few accounts.

I have few accounts because every time I add another account,

things get a little more complex.

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