Hello, my lovelies! The New Year is approaching which mean’s your budgeting may need to change. Nothing beats having a yearly budgeting plan that’s set in stone before the beginning of the year. You may not be fully in control of your budget yet and that’s OK. The New Year is a perfect time to get your budgeting straight as you can look back at the whole year and budget based on the last year. This is New Year Budgeting Tips!
Tune Your Budget
We all know that starting something like this requires a plan and the start of the year is the best time to come up with a plan for the whole year. You need to start with the income you expect, with your fixed expenses like; rent or mortgage, insurance etc and your savings goals. The money you have left over can be for your other expenses.
You need to set a realistic budget to help you set your financial goals and to remind you to stick to them. Obviously no budget is perfect and people make mistakes; so don’t worry about that! You need to have a look back on the last year to help you to make better decisions.
Plan Ahead To Meet Goals
You need to consider all the steps that you need to do to accomplish your budgeting goals. You may have short term goals and long term goals. Short term goals would be purchasing a car or a home and Long term goals such as retirement.
Spend Carefully
You need to know the difference between needs and wants. Needs are the necessities that you need to live and wants are the things you want but don’t need to survive like luxury items. You need to first sort out your needs and then if you have anything left over, put it towards wants.
Credit Score
Your credit score is so important, so if you need to work on it; this is the best time to do it. If your score is under 700, you need to make it a priority to increase your credit score in 2023. You can do this in number of ways like paying your bills on time and make sure you pay it off in full, paying off whatever debt you can, limiting how many bank accounts you open and cutting back on all that spending you do be doing.
Emergency Fund
I like to be on top of unexpected costs and an Emergency Fund is one of the best way’s to cover any unexpected or planned costs. This will cover any unplanned car maintenance, medical bills, dental bills and a lot more.
Shop Around
As you know there is a cost of living crisis and some companies have raised they’re prices 1000% more than what they used to be. Shop around for all of your utilities and even if you need work done around the house or the car. Get a number of different quotes before you hire anyone!
Hopefully these tips help!
Bee xx
I like the idea of planning ahead. We are working to set a budge for this month and the holiday. These are great tips and will definitely help us.
great points here!
These are helpful tips on how and why to get started with a budget. The new year is always a great time for reflection on what worked & didn’t work in the past, reviewing where your money went, and where you’d like to see it go. I can’t help but reiterate your point on having a long term money goal for retirement – start early, even if you only have enough income to budget $5 per month to add to your retirement account! It will help you develop your “saving muscle” and you will be able to increase how much you save over time. I started out saving $5 per pay period (it really helps to have the money deducted straight into your retirement account, you’ll never miss it). Eventually, I was able to max out my retirement saving accounts each year. Budgeting was key. The more you save when you’re young, the less you will have to catch up later!
These are really great tips and just in time to kick of the new year the right way!