What is the proper way to make a budget? I went to Grok, to see what it had to say.
Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Budget
Calculate Your Net Monthly Income
Start with your take-home pay (after taxes, deductions, and benefits). Include reliable sources like salary, freelance gigs, side hustles, child support, or investment income. If income varies, average the last 3–6 months. Example: $4,000 salary + $500 side income = $4,500 total monthly income.
Track and List All Your Expenses
Review bank/credit card statements, receipts, and bills from the past 1–3 months. Categorize them: Fixed expenses (predictable): Rent/mortgage, utilities, insurance, loan payments, subscriptions. Variable expenses (fluctuate): Groceries, gas, dining out, entertainment, shopping. Be honest and thorough—small daily spends (coffee, apps) add up.
Categorize and Compare Income vs. Expenses
Add up total expenses and subtract from income. Positive balance → Room to save or pay debt. Negative balance → Need to cut spending. Use a simple spreadsheet, app (like Mint, YNAB, or Excel), or free worksheet from consumer.gov.
Set Financial Goals
Decide what the “extra” money should do: build an emergency fund (3–6 months of expenses), pay off debt, save for a house/vacation, or invest for retirement. Make goals specific, measurable, and realistic (e.g., “Save $200/month for emergency fund”).
Choose a Budgeting Method
Pick one that fits your style: 50/30/20 Rule (simple & popular): 50% needs (housing, food, transport, minimum debt), 30% wants (dining out, hobbies, fun), 20% savings/debt payoff.
Zero-Based Budgeting: Assign every dollar a job until income minus expenses = $0. Great for detailed control.
Envelope System: Allocate cash (or digital “envelopes”) for categories like groceries; once empty, stop spending.
Pay Yourself First: Automate savings/investments right after payday, then budget the rest.
Create Your Plan and Allocate Money
Build a monthly template. Adjust categories so everything fits. Example for $4,500 income using 50/30/20:
Needs (50%): $2,250
Wants (30%): $1,350
Savings/Debt (20%): $900
Track, Review, and Adjust Monthly
Check progress weekly. At month-end, compare actual vs. planned spending. Life changes (new job, inflation), so tweak as needed. Consistency beats perfection.
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That’s a nice breakdown of what I do to balance my budget. Sometimes, your budget gets upside down. You owe more than you’re bringing in. This is where we are with the American budget. This requires you (in this case “We The People”) to cut costs in many different places and be frugal until the upside down part is paid off. This is what our government should be doing. And while Conservatives are better at budgeting than Liberals, that does not mean they are GOOD at budgeting. Everyone in the government is spending “someone else’s money” and therefore they’re doing a poor job of it.
This government (and by that I mean Trump’s administration, the next three years, and possibly into Vance and Freitas’s terms) NEEDS to make a damn budget. I don’t mean whatever it is they’ve done over the past 25 years. I mean a real, honest to goodness budget. They need to do housekeeping and they need to show us, the American people, WE THE PEOPLE what they are spending and where.
I realize there will be places where it just says, “Security – TS Clearance” or something similar, and we’re going to have to take it at face value. That’s fine. It’s when we don’t see any of those costs that it becomes a problem. When it looks like security, or farm aid, or bailing out car companies or banks, or whatever is free (even when we know it’s only “free at point of service”), there’s a problem. People lose sight of the money that is being spent. That’s why there’s so much fraud being discovered right now.
Imagine, for a moment, how much fraud would be exposed and expunged if our government were required to do a public (or mostly public, within security barriers) audit every four years (right before a President leaves office, for instance)? It would be glorious. It would show the American people just how much a President has actually done for the country.
So how do we calculate the net monthly income of the United States? Well, I looked into it, and it’s roughly $23.6 trillion dollars per year, or about $1.967 trillion dollars per month. In looking this stuff up on Grok, it’s limited in what it can access, but it looks as though we’re currently spending about $2 trillion dollars a month, so a bit more in monthly expenses than we make. Obviously, the details are much larger than what I’m writing about here, but I have to work in generalities because again, there isn’t enough transparency for any of us peons to see what’s actually being paid out or taken in. We can only guess. And that, my friends, is a real problem.
We need to cut spending. Everyone seems to agree (or mostly everyone… all of the Right and portions of the Left agree). What can’t be agreed on is WHAT we should cut, spending-wise. The Right wants to fund military and some government oversight stuff. The Left wants social safety nets. Of the two, our Constitution seems to indicate the Right is correct and the Left should be doing its social safety nets at the state or community level, NOT the Federal level. But it’s hard (for me, at least) to get overly judgmental about bad spending on the Left when I’m also seeing bad spending on the Right (for example, farm subsidies, abstinence only sex ed come to mind, but there’s pork in all those barrels). Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want the Left spending money on songbirds in Denmark or trans rights in Africa. I just also do not want to pay farmers not to farm (especially right now) or to bolster the price of food (never a good thing imo), or to teach something that has proven it just doesn’t work.
The only way, in my VERY strong opinion, to get past this whole pork barrel bullshit, is to budget from the ground up. There should never be “cutting something from the budget” involved. It should be, “We can’t put that INTO the budget, because we’ve run out of money.” Period.
And folks? We’re the richest country in the world. We need to live inside our damn means. That means tightening our belts for a while. It might mean we need to see a number of our stores close (do we really need to support 8 different coffee shops inside a one mile radius? I think not). Money needs to be shifted, and start paying the important stuff.
Looking at all the numbers above, I begin to understand how much DOGE did, and didn’t do. Sure, they rooted out millions of dollars in fraud and waste. But that’s not even a single day worth of budget. It’s not even a measurable PORTION of a single day of budget. That’s how tiny it was.
We can’t keep living the way we’re living, folks. Time to buckle down. Buy less. Grow more. Waste less. Support local companies, because they’re literally the ones that keep us fed. Look at how we fed the nation during WWI and WWII. Look at how we dealt with the Depression. We need to learn, or re-learn those lessons, so we don’t have to repeat them.
Time’s a’wastin’, boys.