Budgeting is a skill that cannot be ignored no matter your income level. Whether you are budgeting to pay rent, saving up for a vacation, or just trying to create some security with a robust savings account, your success will be dependent upon how well you can keep superfluous expenses at bay.

Creating a good budget doesn’t have to be complicated. With the proper tools and know-how at your disposal, you gain an edge in making the process go smoothly. Insight into what makes a budget work provides a solid foundation to turn following a budget into a long-term habit.

Here are some ideas and resources that make budgeting easier.

Keep It Simple

The best budget is the one that’s followed. Each person is different and has unique financial issues that plague them, therefore it’s helpful to try different strategies that have worked well for others and test their efficacy.

There are readily available strategies that can be employed. Trying out these different ways to budget and evaluating their effectiveness will help you figure out if it’s the right strategy for you.

50/30/20

Popularized by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi in their 2005 book All Your Worth, this simple strategy breaks up expenses into 3 main categories: Needs, Wants, and Savings. From there you break up your budget in a way that is proportional to your specific needs. Typically this would entail having 50% go towards Needs, 30% towards Wants, with the rest going to Savings. Of course, you can change these amounts to fit your situation.

The benefit of this strategy lies in the evaluation of your monthly expenses. Clearly defining what counts as a need or want is essential for determining what expenses can be trimmed. For someone not used to budgeting, this is a great first step to figuring out a game plan.

Second Account

A good way to remove the temptation to spend extra funds is to  separate them from needed funds. This can be done in different ways but an easy method is to open a second checking account. This account can be used to partition funds for different purposes. An account containing the funds needed to pay necessary monthly payments can ensure those payments take top priority. Funds can be placed away to save for a larger expense.

This separate account can be opened at your current financial institution or another to create extra distance from those funds. With free accounts like Astra Bank offers, you can be sure those funds aren’t depleted by unnecessary fees and monthly minimums.

Make It Happen Automatically

Building a new habit is a difficult process that requires active, willful effort. It adds a mental workload to an otherwise normal day. Making the conscious decision to budget and spend accordingly should eventually become a long term habit, but automating the process as much as possible is extremely helpful.

Utilizing the benefits that your bank offers to set up automatic transfers between accounts, as well as setting up automatic ACH payments for those important bills takes some of the workload away. Online/Mobile Banking typically offers the ability to set up automatic transfers, even at miniscule amounts that amount to a daily cup of coffee. While you don’t notice these transfers in the short term, in the long term they add up and help build that savings.

Use the Right Tools

A budget that is used is the one that makes the most sense to the person using it and speaks to that person’s unique budgeting issues. For some, a simple and small spreadsheet built in Excel or Google Sheets will suffice. Others, with more complicated finances, may require something more to make sense of all of the data. Whatever the situation may be, here are some budgeting tools that may help out:

Use a Spreadsheet Template

Making a spreadsheet from scratch is not the easiest method of building a budget and can be extremely time-consuming. Avoid this by using a budgeting template. Microsoft Excel offers templates for different occasions from budgeting rent each month, to saving up for a wedding.

Even if you don’t have access to Excel, there are still free options available to you. Google Sheets is free to use provided you have a Google account. These spreadsheets can be accessed anywhere you can login to Google, making them much easier to access. Open Office Calc is another free spreadsheet resource that works similarly to Excel and can be just as useful in building a budget.

Mint

Mint is an aggregate financial data app that gathers all of your accounts and brings them together into a single interface. Using your account information, Mint categorizes spending and gives a bird’s eye view of debt, expenses, and income. If you have multiple accounts with different organizations, credit cards, loans, or investments, Mint can give you a look at all of them through a single app. Mint can also help budgeting by allowing access to create goals for spending in different categories each month.

One of the most difficult aspects of budgeting is gathering all of your financial data. Mint does this for you. Additionally, Mint has a great credit report program built into their software and offers tips to improve your credit tailored specifically to your situation. While the initial setup may take some time as you have to give Mint access to those accounts, once it is done it keeps everything up to date.

If you do use Mint, make sure you use all of the security features available in order to protect your data and accounts.

Quicken

Being a go-to for budgeting purposes for a long time, Quicken is still a great tool to use if you have a broad financial landscape. The software can track your spending and help you keep track of all of your expenses. It can be connected to your accounts and pull your transaction data.

Organizing a large amount of transactions will take a heftier software, of which Quicken may be the right choice for those needs.

Conclusion

Different needs call for different tools and the tools that work for those needs will be the most valuable to whomever is utilizing them. However, at all levels of financial knowledge, some sort of budgeting skill is necessary. Budgeting allows for the proper use of funds to not only create financial stability, but also for building up to a higher and comfortable standard of living.

The ideas and tools presented here are just a few of those available but hopefully they can be useful in some way or another. Finding the right way of budgeting that works for you is the final goal and sometimes that takes trying out different methods already available.