For many years I tried, and failed, to make a budget. Planning ahead, I discovered, didn’t work for me. I’d sit down with a piece of paper and scribble some expenses, starting with the easy, predictable ones like rent. But, soon I’d get to the more nebulous areas of my budget, like [...]
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A budget where every dollar is perfectly allocated is stifling and counter-productive. Instead, set aside ‘blow money’ — money you can spend on whatever you want, that you don’t have to track. Blow money is the productive mess necessary in personal finance, it’s a release valve that lets you vent a little steam.
Without [...]
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The New York Times, using data form the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has created the budget of the Average American. You can click around and see, on average, what your neighbors are spending their money on. Most interesting, the budget is color-coded so you can easily see how inflation has affected the various [...]
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