1. When you have a regular income, you want to save
a part of your income and build a corpus for achieving your short-term and
long-term goals by setting a budget for your monthly expenses.
2. However, you start becoming disillusioned when your expenses start
overshooting your preset budget, although you may be serious about your saving plan.
3. Therefore, you need to ensure that your budget is a realistic
one, as you may have set very tight spending limits in your effort to save the
maximum from your income, and it may not be possible to live within such
constraints.
4. You should, therefore, go through your expenses
for the past few months and identify the categories in which you are
over-shooting your budget.
5. These may be the areas for which you have not
set aside enough, given your expenses and interests, and you should consider increasing your allocation
to these expenses if you are sure you cannot reduce them.
6. Once you are sure that your budget is realistic,
you should be flexible with your allocations, and if you have overspent in a particular category,
you should make up in another, or during another month.
7. These steps may lead to lower savings for you,
but it is better to have a workable budget than one that has to be discarded altogether because it is too ambitious.
8. You must also see your plan as being successful to
have the motivation to keep you going by breaking long-term goals into
short-term targets, so that they do not seem too far away or
too large an amount to be saved.
9. The idea of a budget should not be to eliminate
all discretionary spending, but to do it with caution.
10. This, along with a sense of accomplishment at
meeting your goals, will keep you on the path set by your budget.