Budgeting doesn’t always mean saving money, hence the name of my site! Often people associate the act of having a budget with being frugal and saving a ton of cash, and it isn’t always so. There are many wealthy people, think the 1% er’s, that have budgets and yet don’t feel the need to coupon clip or shop the clearane rack at the department store. This people make a certain amount of money each month just like the rest of us, and then they have a set amount of bills and disposable income as well. Granted they may have quite a bit more disposable income than the rest of us are us to, but the concept is still quite similar.
There isn’t anything special about a budget, it simply lays out how much money you (and perhaps a spouse) bring in each month, and then how much you plan on spending each month is deducted, which leaves us with a combination of savings, investment potential, and disposable income. My wife and I aren’t necessarily very frugal people, and while we aren’t rich, we also are in a higher than average income tax bracket. That being said, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a budget set for ourselves. We will have a spreadsheet that lays out our monthly income, and then deducts our fixed and variable expenses, and then how much we are left with to spend each month. We are always happier with a larger end result, meaning more money, but I can’t say we do much in the way of coupon clipping and bargain shopping. To be quite honest, we save a certain percentage of our income and whatever is left over at the end we are more then comfortable exhausting…after all, we do work hard for it!
So as you can see budgeting doesn’t always mean saving!