Budgeting in Six Easy Steps

Creating and sticking to a personal budget is a vital part of personal financial planning.

Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Washington offers an easy, six-step method for arriving at a budget you can live with:

Step 1
Determine your monthly income. Take into consideration your payroll deductions (health insurance or other group benefits, income taxes, union dues, pension) and other sources of income.

Add together all income, less deductions. On a piece of paper record the resulting figure as "value a."

Step 2
List your "fixed" and "variable" monthly expenses, such as housing, utilities, food and transportation. Remember to allocate funds for clothing, medical care, child care, personal expenses, recreation and emergencies/repairs.

Break down your annual, semi-annual and quarterly expenses (taxes, insurance) into a monthly figure that can be put aside and withdrawn when these bills become due. Example: car insurance that is $150 every six months needs $25 per month set aside. You will earn interest on these funds and will have no problems meeting all other expenses in the months these become payable.

Remember not to duplicate expenses that may already be deducted from your paycheck.

Add all of your expenses - this is "value b."

Step 3
The next step is to find your "discretionary income" by subtracting your total expenses (b) from your total net income (a). Write this number down on a piece of paper as "value c."

Step 4
List all unsecured debts (credit cards etc.), the monthly payments and the balances. If you don't know your exact debt amount, now is the time to determine it.

Record your monthly total as "value d" and continue with the next step.

Step 5
Some of your discretionary income is committed to the installment debt listed above. Step 5 is to determine if you have any remaining discretionary income after making these installment payments by subtracting your total monthly payments to creditors (d) from your discretionary income (c).

If this figure is a negative number, you are not ready for Step 6 - Setting Goals. Consult a personal financial counsellor and work on getting this figure into the positive numbers.

Step 6
It is now time to establish short and long-term goals. Make a list of these goals, using these examples to help you get started.

• Long Term - real estate purchases, future education, retirement
• Short Term - home improvements, new car, travel
• Other Desired Investments - stocks, bonds, CDs, mutual funds
  

Once you have made a list, determine how much you need to save monthly by dividing the amount of money required to meet each goal by the number of months that you have available to save for it.

Success Quotes-5

William Lloyd Garrison:

The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers.

William Lyon Phelps:

This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him.

William M. Winans:

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.

William Menninger:

Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.

William Saroyan:

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Winston Churchill:

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Success Quotes-4

Pearl S. Buck:

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

Pearl S. Buck:

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Self-trust is the first secret of success.

Richard Bach:

Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.

Robert F. Kennedy:

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Samuel Smiles:

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.

Samuel Smiles :

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910

Thomas Alva Edison:

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Wolfe:

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

Vaclav Havel:

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Vanessa Redgrave:

Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.

Vince Lombardi:

Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

Vince Lombardi:

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

Success Quotes-3

Havelock Ellis:

It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.

Helen Keller:

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Henry David Thoreau:

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

Henry David Thoreau:

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Henry Ford:

If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right. also attributed to Mary Kay Ash

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight, / But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night.

Herbert B. Swope:

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.

J.C. Penney:

Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I'll give you a stock clerk.

James A. Froude:

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

John C. Maxwell:

The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness.

Jonathan Kozol:

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. On Being a Teacher

Lily Tomlin:

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

Lloyd Jones:

Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed. (adapted)

Louis L'Amour:

Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.

Margaret Mead:

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach:

Conquer, but don't triumph.

Maxine Hong Kingston:

To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world -- that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Maya Lin:

To fly, we have to have resistance.

Michael Korda:

To succeed, we must first believe that we can.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Greatness is not in where we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it -- but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Pablo Picasso:

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Pearl S. Buck:

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Success Quotes-2

Bessie Stanley:

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.

published 11/30/1905 in the Lincoln (Kansas) Sentinel - an adaptation of this is often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, though nothing like it has been found in his writings.

Bessie Stanley (adapted; erroneously attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson):

Success

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.

Often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is an adaptation of a poem published in 1905 by Bessie Stanley. No version of it has been found in Emerson's writings. For more information see http://www.transcendentalists.com/success.htm

Bruce Feirstein:

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.

Coco Chanel:

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

Corita Kent:

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

Corita Kent:

Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.

David Brinkley:

A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.

Demosthenes:

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

Elaine Maxwell:

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

Elbert Hubbard:

The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized, vilified, and misunderstood. This is part of the penalty for greatness, and evey man understands, too, that it is no proof of greatness.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

This entry continued ...

Emily Dickinson:

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

G. K. Chesterton:

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

George Washington Carver:

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

Success Quotes-1

Peter F. Drucker:

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Abraham Lincoln:

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.

Albert Einstein:

The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour -- property, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

Albert Einstein:

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.

Albert Schweitzer:

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Alex Noble:

If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day.

Anna Pavlova:

To follow without halt, one aim; there is the secret of success. And success? What is it? I do not find it in the applause of the theater; it lies rather in the satisfaction of accomplishment.

Barbara Jordan:

All my growth and development led me to believe that if you really do the right thing, and if you play by the rules, and if you've got good enough, solid judgment and common sense, that you're going to be able to do whatever you want to do with your life.

Benjamin Disraeli:

The secret of success is constancy to purpose.

Benjamin Franklin:

There are no gains without pains.

Bernadette Devlin:

Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.