Читать книгу Personal Finance in Your 20s & 30s For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 37

Another method of budgeting involves starting completely from scratch rather than examining your current expenses and making cuts from that starting point. Ask yourself how much you’d like to spend on different areas (such as rent, meals out, and so on). This is called zero-based budgeting.

The advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t allow your current spending levels to constrain your thinking. Just because your current rent is $1,500 per month doesn’t mean that it needs to remain there. When your current lease expires, you could change your housing arrangements and perhaps find a nice rental you can share with others. I did this in my early years after college, and doing so enabled me to keep my rent low and save more money.

You’ll likely be amazed at the discrepancies between what you think you should be spending and what you actually are spending in certain categories. Take going out to eat, to bars, and to concerts, for example. You may think that spending $150 per month is reasonable and then discover that you’ve been averaging $250 per month in this category. Thus, you’d need to slash your spending here by 40 percent to get to your target.