Although having a monthly budget is important in managing finances, creating a budget has its challenges. What are the biggest challenges commonly faced and how to overcome them?
3 Biggest Challenges When Making a Monthly Budget
1. Consistency
Just like many other things, in order to become jago at budgeting, you must do it consistently. If you do it this month but not the next month, the results will not be optimal.
Budgeting consistently can minimize the possibility of overspending and keep your finances in order with the money being used according to plan.
In order to budget consistently, you can pick a time that suits your preferences. For example, you can make a budget on payday or at the beginning of every month. To help, you can set a reminder on your phone or mark your calendar.
2. Clear financial goals
To make budgeting fun and uplifting, you need to set clear financial goals. Often, many people do not have clear financial goals. In the end, budgeting doesn’t work as it should because they don’t know what they want to achieve.
How to overcome this one challenge is very easy. You need to know first, what do you really want to achieve? Do you want to be able to live a comfortable retirement life and not burden others? What about financial goals such as running your own business, buying a house, car, etc.?
You need to think thoroughly about the financial goals you want to achieve, both in the short and long term. There's no need to rush, Jagoans. List down your financial goals so you can take steps to realizing them one by one.
Having clear financial goals also helps you resist the urge to use money irresponsibly, such as constantly buying things you don't really need.
3. Unexpected expenses
The last biggest challenge in creating a monthly budget is to include unexpected expenses. Life is full of uncertainty. There are no guarantees that things will continue to go our way.
Calculating unexpected expenses is a challenge in itself because we have to prepare for something unpredictable, which we don't know when it will happen. Therefore, many people are reluctant to allocate a budget for unexpected expenses.
It's always better to be safe than sorry. So, make sure that when making a monthly budget, you also set aside money for emergency savings. This way, you will be ready if one day an emergency happens and it requires you to spend money to overcome it.
Easy and Practical Budgeting with Jago
Which budgeting challenges do you experience the most? Time to tackle them. Budgeting can be easy and practical with the Jago application. Relying on technological advances, you no longer need to do budgeting manually.
How do you budget in the Jago application? The feature for you to use is the Pocket feature. The Jago application allows you to create lots of Savings and Spending Pockets. Each Pocket can be personalized as needed. Each Pocket also has its own account number. This is perfect for those of you who want to have multiple bank accounts.
After creating Pockets, you can move money from the Main Pocket. When all the Pockets are filled with money, this means that you have done budgeting. Next, you only need to monitor expenses and make sure all expenses stick to the budget.
The Jago application can be downloaded here if you don’t have it yet.
