hdYb: Freshmen Budget

Meet Maggie Bea Dawsey. She is a full-time student at UNA. (As a side note, she is currently raising money to do mission work in Kenya, Africa, so check out her website here: www.maggibeainkenya.com.) She gets a weekly "allowance" from her parents that she has to manage to stay alive, but doesn't have many bills to take care of. Just the word "budget" is intimidating to her, so she just goes from "check-to-check" without knowing really where the money goes.

So the question is how should she budget?

She does not need a complicated budget. She doesn't need to buy quicken or hire an accountant. If a budget is simply tracking how much comes in and how much goes out, then she just needs to know how much her parent's will be giving her each week or month and set back any priority expenses such as gas or food. Then she should just track her day-to-day expenses and not go over the magic number that's left (after the priority expenses). This could simply be glancing at her online banking (at listerhill.com) from time to time or tracking it in an excel file. Which ever works for her.

If you were (or are) in this situation, how would you budget? Stop by tomorrow as we dig deeper by taking a look at our, you guessed it, Sophomore Budget.

Chris