@Lee – Correct, I’m trying to spend more energy making money rather than budgeting since I do spend less than what I earn.

@Scott and Jeff – I expect both of you to keep me in check. The 10-1-1-1-1 did help me prevent large furniture purchases this month. When my rental income comes in, I might splurge a little. However, both of you can remind me to stay the course by not buying furniture.

@Adrian – Couldn’t agree more, the 10-1-1-1-1 is more effective for me compared to the “No Budget Budget”

@ Mark – You certainly keep track of your expenses and the key for you, I suspect, is to simply know what you are doing when you make those seemingly-discretionary (e.g. gifts, etc.) expenditures …

… as Diane says: “some of our ‘investments are in relationships rather than selfishly hoarded and used to grow our net worth … but those are choices only we can make for ourselves.”

If there’s one suggestion that I can make – and, this is in the context of creating good spending habits now that will hold you in good stead through all of your future financial up’s/down’s (family commitments; job changes; business successes and failures; etc; etc.) – it would be to see if 10-1-1-1-1 will help you divert from “impulse spending” while still allowing you to spend wherever your head/heart REALLY says to …

I treat our ‘budget’ more like a business. In other words, you have a continuing goal to keep costs down and the simpler the solution you can apply to do this, the easier it is to do, the easier it is to stay on track and you basically ‘get it out of the way’ so you can do what? Focus on building income of course! And the two together are what drives larger and larger chunks of cash into your savings account every month that you can use to invest.

Personally I just don’t think it’s an either, or situation. We can’t just focus on making more money and have that be it. You can indeed increase your income exponentially, but we can also increase our spending exponentially to match it, hence there is no wealth being built. Some people argue that this isn’t true, that the answer is to keep increasing income, then those same individuals will point to Dr.’s and lawyers say “See how those Dr.’s and lawyers, etc.. make hundreds of thousands per year and they are not rich, they are still broke!”. The answer is in both increasing income as well as not spending it all. Both. It’s just math.

Unless someone has the next Google, Microsoft, or McDonalds about to take off of course, but in the meantime, this is what we can be doing to insure we are working towards our number.

At the same time, someone can’t just focus on controlling spending and save 100-500 bucks per month and expect to become wealthy, but you HAVE to do that to get started with Money Making 101 to get the financial house cleaned up and to get ready to fuel those investments, business startups, real-estate purchases, etc… so it takes BOTH the budgeting and the income increasing.

But once again, I believe the trick(so you are not focusing too much on just the dreaded “B” word) is to get things set up automatic. Auto pays on mortgages, insurance, utilities, etc… wherever possible and then establish your PLAN on how much you are going to ALLOW for gifts, entertainment, etc.. etc.. and pull out cash and use for these things, or have automatic deposits into totally separate checking accounts for these expenses so that there is no way you can overspend. It’s just not possible, you’ll overdraft when using that debit card or bounce that check. And this will keep you in check so that you stay on track with your monthly savings goals so you can reach your investment goals with that money.