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I basically automate all the things. All of my bills are automated and audited quarterly. My income is automatically put into my checking, savings, and investme
by Jemaclus 8y ago
I basically automate all the things. All of my bills are automated and audited quarterly. My income is automatically put into my checking, savings, and investments on each paycheck. I allocate a reasonable monthly stipend into my checking and the rest go into savings/investments. Each quarter I take surplus funds from the checking and move to savings/invest.
I pay off my credit cards in full each month, carrying no debt. (I was lucky enough to get a full ride to college, so no student loans.)
My finance automation strategy is largely based on Ramit Sethi's book "I Will Teach You To Be Rich", which I highly recommend.
Spending-wise, I do the Marie Kondo "Does this bring me joy?" about things that I'm going to spend money on. I will almost always spend money on food and experiences, but I am much more strict about stuff. I will happily spend $75 to go to a concert but will walk around Target with a $5 DVD in my hand for 45 minutes before putting it back on the shelf.
With the above strategies, I haven't run out of money in my checking in a long time. I am extremely fortunate to not have to think too much about money, but I credit at least some of that to automating away the necessities which limits the risk of spending money I don't have.
- jeffwass 8y agoCan you clarify how you automate and audit your bills? Are you automatically paying your bills each month and check them manually each quarter?
- Jemaclus 8y agoYeah, pretty much. I get email receipts for everything, so nothing is a surprise, but quarterly I'll go through my automated bills and say "do I really use this?" and cut them out. As for how to automate, I basically just have AutoPay on every service that allows it
- kungtotte 8y agoI follow roughly the same strategy. I put money away towards savings and upcoming quarterly/(semi) annual bills, some goes into a No Questions Asked account that I spend on whatever whenever, so that whatever is left in my checking account is the money I have to live on until the next paycheck (food, etc.). I'm never in a position where I have to mentally keep track of the fact that some $Y out of my balance $X is unavailable to spend.
- evolve2k 8y agoI’ve been building MyMoneyZen (https://mymoneyzen.com https://mymoneyzen.com) an online personal budgeting course I’ve built with rails & react that exactly helps people step by step work out how to automate their finances. I would love to hear feedback from anyone that does sign up and decides to give it a go. My sister in law started it as a spreadsheet and used to sit with friends/family for 8 hours and help people work out how to automate everything till she finally decided to take the dive and build it into an app. Probably should list this as a Show HN sometime and give more background.