Here's our candidate for the New Year's resolution that's most frequently broken: Set up a budget.
The "b" word can be so off-putting that financial professionals often prefer to use the more euphemistic "spending plan." As for actually sitting down and setting one up . . . anyone for cleaning out the basement?
Yet figuring out where your money goes is the only way to get it under control. And the process doesn't have to be difficult. To make sure that your resolve — and your budget — last beyond Jan. 31, follow these basic rules:
Keep it simple. A successful budget needs to be compatible with lessons that you learned in kindergarten: Stay on task and take one step at a time.
Make it personal. Rely on sophisticated software if you wish, but paper and pencil work fine, too.
Be positive. Don't think of a budget as a straitjacket that limits your spending and takes the joy out of life. Think of it as a way to control small expenses now so that you can buy bigger stuff — and have more fun — in the future.
Budgets can work — just ask Andrea Roane. Roane prides herself on the wedding present she gave her husband, Michael Skehan, several decades ago. Before their marriage, she set up a budget-tracking system that helped her retire a stack of credit-card bills. Every time she paid off a bill, she cut up a credit card. On their wedding day, she presented her husband with a handful of plastic shards.
"It was my gift for our financial future together," says Roane, a news anchor at WUSA-TV, in Washington.
Roane is still faithful to her budgeting system, which involves no special wizardry: She uses a pencil and a bookkeeping notebook to record expenses and target excesses.
"I like the paper-and-pencil thing," says Roane, who always keeps a notebook handy. "It's my way of staying organized."
The couple keeps a joint checking account, as well as separate accounts to cover their personal expenses and those they've agreed to handle independently — she pays the cable bill, the mortgage and the car-insurance premium. Roane uses her notebooks to remind her when bills are due and to plan for occasional expenses.
Roane has taken a fair share of ribbing from her family for her painstaking approach. But she is unfazed.
"It's my check and my expenses," she says. "I organize me."