How many times have you been stressed about how your bank account will handle the end of one month and the beginning of the next?
No matter how many paychecks you receive in a month, toward the end, things can look a bit sketchy. Your balance begins getting precariously low and you worry that it won't carry you through until your next paycheck. Overdrafts are bad because they cost you more money. Not having food for your family is also unacceptable for the obvious reasons. What can you do about it?
The answer lies within your monthly budget. I will show you how.
In your budget, you plan for things you will spend money on, water, food, rent/mortgage, etc. You also can plan for consistent savings into an emergency fund. What if you also planned to keep a buffer amount of money in your checking account to help smooth over these monthly transitions? How would you feel if instead of hovering barely above a $0 balance, you breathed a sigh of relief seeing $500 or more consistently in that checking account at the end of the month?
I encourage you to try this, for one month, make a budget item that is called something like "Buffer Building." Allocate what you can to that amount and resolve NOT to spend it during the month. Say you allocate just $100 for one month. If you stick true to your budget, and don't spend that $100, and every other category is within limits, wouldn't your checking account show $100 more than it would have?
In the next month, if you don't change anything but still stick to your budget, wouldn't your checking account grow by another $100? Then, you could see that you should have at least $200 at the end of each month as a cushion. Keep that up for another few months and you should see that buffer amount grow even more!
Here may be the best part, by sticking to your budget, that money stays put in your checking account and doesn't shrink! This is because you aren't spending that money and the fact that even if you do dip into it, later paychecks replenish it! All of this is yet another way that sticking diligently to a plan for your monthly spending pays even more dividends than you may have thought.
Interested to see how this applies to your situation? Schedule a complimentary consultation with me at my online calendar link below:
https://calendly.com/todd-clary-cfc/30min