Hello, Weinabbers. My name is Jesse Meckim, and this is podcast number 473 for Weinab,

where we teach you four rules to help you stop them paycheck to paycheck, get out of

debt, and save more money. I'm often asked, what is the ideal budget? What does it look

like? What do the categories look like? What's the structure? How many accounts? And I'm

also asked, not as often as I used to be, but in the software specifically, when, you know,

how do I know if I'm spending the right amount on groceries? Do I have any comparable data?

Do we benchmark? We're looking for benchmarks. We're looking to hold ourselves up in some

form or another and be like, I'm reasonable, or maybe even I'm more reasonable, or oh my

gosh, I've gone crazy. No one else is doing this. And who would have thought? And my

pitch for today is to have you resist the urge to think that there is an ideal budget.

Really, I think what I'm trying to say is there is an ideal budget, and it is your budget.

Pff, mind blown, right? If you think about the ideal budget, what are you asking specifically

for the guy with seven kids, for the guy that lives by himself, for the woman that's in

med school, for the newlywed couple back in, you know, whenever that was, 2003 that just

got married, our ideal budget back then was spent as little as humanly possible. Is that

the ideal now? No, it's not. So the ideal shifts on you even as the same person, it's shifting,

and it's changing. And that ideal, I mean, almost week to week, does it maybe even change?

So maybe there are two action points here. One, there is no ideal budget, except for

the budget that you have set for yourself. Obviously following rule three, where you get

to adjust it as that quote, ideal kind of changes on you. So the ideal budget is one that's

fluid, that is adaptable, that's flexible, that's not rigid, that is yours. That's number

one. The second part may very well be that there are some non-negotiables, some kind of

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