Lesson 5: Creating Your Budget

To complete this exercise from the previous few lessons, add up the money spent in each of your expense categories. And in a separate place, add up all the items you labeled as “wants”, and all the items you labeled as “needs”.

Now it’s time to look at your lists and begin to question things. Did anything surprise you about how you spent your money last month? Are you spending a lot more or a lot less in certain categories than you expected? Are you surprised by how expensive some of the items on your expense list are?

Now that you have an idea of how much you spend in a month, you can start thinking about how you might want to change your spending for next month. How can you do this? By creating a budget!

You can keep your budget very high-level, like setting goals for how much you want to spend in each category, or you can make it more intricate and break down each category further. It’s up to you! This is the fun part-it’s when you get to take the steering wheel and make decisions on how you want your hard-earned money to be spent so you can more quickly reach your money goals.