12-Minute Financial Makeover Step 2 - Enjoy More of Whatever You Like with Budgeting

Our Financial Makeover Series talks about personal finance basics and lets you figure out what applies best to your own unique situation. In Part 1, we talked about avoiding fees and their potential devastating financial pitfall. We also suggested to open a no-fee chequing account to get out of the perpetual monthly banking fee rip-off.

Today, we’ll continue to try to bring excitement to what many consider a tediously boring subject.

Like many, we used to consider budgeting like a restrictive thing. Plainly put, expenses were bad, and income was good. In practice, it mostly translated into trying to have less expenses. At some point, it could also transform into working more to have more income. With that perspective, budgeting was no fun at all.

It was like being on a strict diet all the time. Spending would be like eating. Although some of it is essential to your survival, too much of it is plainly bad. It can either get you fat or poor. With that thinking, discretionary expenses like desserts and treats can be devastating to your wellbeing. In the same fashion, exercise can be compared to income. Regular doses of it can get you in better shape. In the end, this only meant a lot of sacrifice.

Because I liked numbers, I still found some pleasure in it. But to be frank and despite some success, our penny-scratching restrictive budget was a torture that kind of got lost in all the spreadsheets. No insane person would get excited about it. Nobody was really interested to get involved in it either.

Fortunately, our way to budget transformed over the years. It’s now more about pleasure. It’s much more motivating knowing it allows us to get and do more of what we love. We finally realized that, after basic expenses, we could do whatever we liked with the rest of our hard-earned money.

So, to expose our renewed point of view, this post will be about the pleasure of budgeting. We hope you’ll discover how you could enjoy life more with clever budgeting.

Next time, we’ll talk about when we were kind of halfway there with our previous approach that still gave us significant power over our finances thru sensible budget choices.

An Efficient Tool to Boost Your Fun Level

One key to make budgets attractive is to put some spice and fun into it. Wouldn’t it be great if your budget allowed you to have more fun? The great news is that it truly can!

12-Minute Diet and Meal Planner (Revisited)

The 12-Minute Series was originally posted in 2012.

We’ve decided to republish it integrally because we believe it can still help as everyone aspires to make things better.

Let’s hope it stirs up the discussion and stimulates you to change the world 12-Minute at a time!

This article was originally posted on August 12, 2012

When it comes down to food, the 12-Minute Way can be quite useful to help you manage your diet and plan your meals. 

There’s more to it than the common dozen eggs.

Because approximately 40% of food goes to waste in America, an incredible opportunity for improvement exists in the vast food domain, an opportunity to save precious resources and money.

But also an opportunity to reduce stress and free up some of your schedule because, day after day, food preparation can sometimes be pretty hectic and time consuming.