5 Tips to Help You Get on a Budget in 2025

Budgetocity Team • December 16, 2024

Can you believe we're almost done with 2024? This year has flown by! But with the new year comes new beginnings and new resolutions for many people. At Budgetocity, we know that taking on a financial resolution can be overwhelming but necessary. So here are our top 5 tips to budget successfully in 2025!


1. Have Grace!


Budgeting is tricky, whether we like to admit it or not. The hard part isn't learning how to budget. We can help with that! The hardest part is staying committed and disciplined with your budget and tracking your expenses. The hard part is not going out to eat when your Eating Out category is already at zero. The hard part is realizing that when you eat at home to save money, eating at home costs more than you think. The hard part is not arguing with your spouse about that extra coffee order.


This is all normal. Budgeting is hard so have grace with yourself and your accountability partner. At Budgetocity, we say that it takes about 90 days to truly have a good grasp on your budget. You will forget a birthday. You'll forget that pesky subscription that you should have canceled months ago. You'll forget that your kid needs lunch money. It happens. Have grace! You got this!


2. Adjust as you Go!


One of the keys to budgeting is to keep up with it as you go. If you just set up your budget at the beginning of your pay period and don't look at it until the end, you're going to be scratching your head trying to figure out why you went over budget! Your budget is a tool that you should be looking at on a weekly, if not daily, basis. You look at it so you can adjust as you go. If you are eating out too much, either stop eating out too much or move some money from one category to the other so that you can cover your loss. This might look like moving money from your fun money to cover your eating out. If you have a bill that you forgot to include, you might take money from your entertainment category to cover the bill. In Budgetocity, you also need to put that bill into your planner so you'll never forget it again!


3. Use the Planner!


The feature that we are most proud of in Budgetocity is the planner. The planner allows you to keep track of all kinds of events at different timings. For example, if you have an HOA bill that is due once a year, you can have the planner keep track of that for you and insert your HOA Bill into your budget when the time comes. If you go grocery shopping every week, put an event in there for every week! We encourage you to put as much as you can into the planner because we base the budget on the planner, so you don't forget anything. Use the planner to it's full potential to ensure that you aren't forgetting anything. If you did forget something, put it in your planner so that you won't forget about it again. Adding an event to the planner is super easy! Use it!


4. Track Your Transactions


This is the hardest part of budgeting! Keep track of your transactions to see exactly where your money is going. This will help guide and make your budget as accurate as possible. This is the most significant step to budgeting successfully in 2025. This tip takes a lot of discipline. Whenever you swipe your card, put your transaction in on the app. This will ensure that you are up to date, and it will get easier over time. It'll seem like second nature. And the nice thing about this is you won't need to keep receipts lying around. You can just look up that transaction in Budgetocity. Now there are still some receipts that you will want to keep as proof of purchase, but for the most part, this eliminates a lot of paper. Good for you tracking your expenses and saving a tree or two!


5. Have More Grace!


Budgeting is hard! Budgeting can seem very overwhelming in the beginning. We are here for you. Budgeting may seem tedious at first, but you won't want to stop once you see how budgeting can change your life! Budgeting can take you and your family to places you never thought were possible. Budgeting can make your financial future look better than it ever has! But it is up to you to make it happen and execute on all parts of budgeting so have grace with yourself. When you forget to add a transaction or 10 transactions, have grace with yourself and put the transactions in. Don't give up! There is no better time than now to start budgeting. There is no better time than now for you to take control of your finances. Whether you're trying to pay off debt, save for college, or just trying to make your money go further than it ever has, Budgetocity is here to help you take control of your finances! You can do this, and everyone here at Budgetocity is pulling for you!


Let's make the most out of 2025! Your financial New Year's Resolution starts right here at Budgetocity!


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I’m going to let you in on a little secret: before Budgetocity™, I had a little bit of a saving problem. Not saving as in saving money and putting it into a savings account – saving money as setting aside savings goals and not planning for them. Imagine this: It’s the start of September, and the autumnal equinox takes place in under a few weeks. The days are already a little shorter, and the nights are longer. Before you know it, it’s Christmastime. It has come to my attention that Christmas comes at the same time every single year. This almost comes as a surprise to a lot of us. We’ll finish our Thanksgiving meal, throw on some Mariah Carey, and we start scanning through Black Friday Specials – but have we financially planned for such things? Have we adequately set up a budget or a savings goal to pay for these expenses? I can tell you from personal experience – I haven’t! I know I’m not alone. Many people out there don't plan for the holidays or savings goals and are stuck last-minute shopping, and more importantly, last-minute spending when the money wasn’t put in the budget for that month. This is where Budgetocity comes in to help. With Budgetocity, you can set savings goals . Let’s go back to Christmas, for example. Christmas comes on the same day and month every single year. This is no longer a surprise to us. Saving for occasions Now let’s pretend that I really want to spoil my wife this year for Christmas. When I create my savings goal, I want to have an extra $800 saved by November 25th. Once I have that information and goal set, I can manually start my savings goal today. If I already have money put away toward that savings goal, or if I need to adjust it, Budgetocity will do the work for me, and I can check my progress as I go. Another example could be a family vacation. I’m going to New York City with my wife here in a few months. Now, if we want to be smart about spending a week in the Big Apple, we want to have a specific amount of money saved to spend on that vacation so that we aren’t hurting ourselves anywhere else in our budget for that month. By setting my vacation goal today, Budgetocity will give me a great roadmap to reach my savings goal by letting me know how much I need to save per month! This is one of my favorite features from Budgetocity. Saving for future emergencies Those who know me well also know that I have too many pets - and with pets, come vet visits – and vet visits, come vet bills. In our monthly budget, we put money away in what we call our “Pet Sinking Fund” along with our savings and emergency fund. While we do not have a specific goal in mind for that fund, we put money away in that fund monthly and build that up so that when a crisis happens with a pet, we are not struggling financially or have caught ourselves in an uproar. When we save, we do a lot more than just setting aside money every month. We’re constantly building the foundation of changing our financial futures and taking control of our finances. What goals are you setting, and what are you saving for? We are working hard to make your budgeting experience even better with some features we’ll be announcing soon, and we’re excited about it!
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