When you're setting up a budget, a general rule is to start with your fixed expenses - your housing and insurance payments, and car payment, if you own one.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A budget should be judged by whether it creates a foundation for the success of American working families striving to buy a house, or to send their kids to college, or to save a little for retirement and, if they're lucky, a vacation.
What's the point of creating a budget if it's not possible to follow through?
Manage your spending by creating and sticking to a budget.
Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them.
How many people out there really set a budget?
What you don't do, if you're an adult, is decide that you're going to budget things through a sequester. What does that word have to do with budgeting? It's like if you have a family budget and go, 'We really don't know what to take out economically from the budget, so we're going to whack out protein for this week.'
What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.
Every family in America knows they have to do a budget. Every small business in America knows they have to do a budget. Every local government, every state, knows they have to do a budget.
I will never be able to create a budget from scratch with the amount of time that I have, but my instructions remain the same: Give me a budget that has no new revenue.
A cardinal rule in budgeting and saving is to pay yourself first. Once your paycheck hits your account, wisdom has it that you should move some amount to savings even before you pay the bills.