Since I am busy being a parent I thought I would share an author with you. She is Sarah Scrafford. Her writing I find helpful and straightford. On her site there is more of her work.
Sarah Scrafford is an industry critic, as well as a regular contributor on the subject of Small business. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com
You wake up one morning and decide to diet – you need to lose at least 20 lbs, you need to get fit and you need to regain your health. The ingredients that contribute towards making a good diet are all at hand – your morning jog in the park, your healthy breakfast, active schedule, a light lunch, an hour’s workout in the evening, and a low calorie dinner before you hit the sack. You follow this routine religiously for a month or so and then step on your bathroom scales – only to find that you’ve hardly lost 2 lbs.
You throw in the towel and go back to an undisciplined life where you eat all you want and laze around as much as you can. After all, a month worth of toil has not worked wonders for you, so why bother? If that’s the way you feel, I’ll let you in on a secret, the secret to becoming both healthy and wealthy; the most perfect diets and the best prepared budgets have one thing in common – they’re only as good as the people who follow them. In short, there’s no use going to great lengths to search a variety of sources and spend valuable time preparing a detailed and cost-saving budget (or diet) only to stray away from the chosen path soon after you’ve started.
Financial planners and dieticians can only help you put ideas on paper and map out a strategy for you to follow. But it’s up to you to put good use to that piece of scrap and turn it into the figurative pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Diets and budgets do not have time limits – they are perennial tasks that have to be followed day after day, week after week, year after year, for as long as you live, especially if your income is barely enough to meet your expenditure.
Budgets are not the universal solutions to financial problems; they only help those who help themselves. Even if a strategy takes time to pay off, stick to it. Remember the story of the hare and the tortoise? Slowly, but steadily, is the way to go. In the long run, being disciplined and staying on course will bring in the rewards, not just financially, but otherwise too. For one, you’re setting the standard to follow for your children – if they realize the value of money and budgeting at an early age, you can rest assured that they will not have one financial worry throughout their lives.
Of course, there are time outs of limited periods where you can spend a little more, like on vacations and during other special events. But at the end of the day, if you do not get back on track and stick to your budget, it’s going to be very hard to meet expenses and stay out of debt.
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