Budgeting

When I was younger budgeting was easier. The reason it was easier because I didn't use a bank account and I would simply put money in designated envelopes. Life was simple.

Now that I'm a responsible adult, I have a bank account and I rarely have cash in my hands. The envelope idea doesn't work.

Last night on my drive home from work I was day dreaming about how I could budget like I used to in this age of bits and bytes. Budgeting on a computer doesn't give that instant response of "Oh crap, I don't have any cash for clothes left" as an empty envelope.

The idea I came up with was using poker chips to represent the money allocated for a particular catagory.

I'm still pondering how I would want to store the chips so that it's obvious how much is left. I want to easily gaze at each "envelope" and see how much is left so that I can start to curb my spending when the budget is low.

I saw online that there are clear holders for chips that I would be able to easily stack the chips in columns for each category. They usually have 5 column (one for each chip color) but I think I might have more categories than that so that may not be good. Using the holder also means having to either buying the holder online or searching stores for them.

What I came up with for now is using ziplock bags instead of envilopes. They're easy to aquire and they're clear. We'll see how well it works.

I haven't implemented my idea as of yet, I'll let everyone know how well it works.

Eric Moritz

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