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My wife and I are planning for retirement and one of the super helpful things we started is using a budgeting app and diligently planning and then tracking ever

• orangepanda 5y ago
  I second this. Dont even try to blindly budget - first track your expenses for a few months. Might find that the 2nd yacht isnt worth it.
• frereubu 5y ago
  This has helped me enormously. As a sibling comment suggests, don't budget to start with, just track what you're spendind your money on for two or three months, then you'll know what you actually spend your money on, and it will help you to identify things that you might be able to change. For all that some puritanical budgeters would say, my experience has been that it's not things like take-out coffee that are the bulk of my expenses, but things like housing. Getting a better mortgage deal / cheaper rent is going to be several orders of magnitude more effective then doing without take-out coffees. Edit: For what it's worth, I use You Need A Budget, and have my bank accounts automatically linked so much of the categorisation is done for me. Some people don't like that a cloud service has your financial information, so YMMV depending on your views on that. I was also categorising payments manually to start with (YNAB didn't have UK bank integration for a long time) and I actually found it really helpful because it forced me to be aware of what I was spending money on. I use https://syncforynab.com/ https://syncforynab.com/ in preference to the built-in sync because it uses my bank's API and payments come through to YNAB instantly rather than on a delay. Having a budget has made financial planning significantly easier and less stressful.