Book Title: The One Week Budget: Learn to Create Your Money Management System in 7 Days or Less!
Author: Tiffany Aliche
Author of the Summary and Review: Sabrina Mahar
Page Count: 134
Published: 2011
Rating: 4.5
Genre: Personal Finance
“The most important aspect of keeping your money is being aware of how much of it you are spending.” Tiffany ‘The Budgetnista’ Aliche
Introduction:
One Week Budget is a self help personal finance and budget managing book of Tiffany Aliche. It was published in 2011. Tiffany Aliche is a personal finance expert and educator. She is an award-winning teacher of financial education. She empowers women and provides them with access to the tools and resources needed to create a better life for themselves and their families.
It is a very well written, clear, easy to follow, and helpful book to manage your finances easily and practically. It is easy to read and easy to follow the weekly plan defined in the book. It is really helpful for each and everybody who is struggling to manage their finances, are in any financial crisis, are deciding to move out and live independently, or for those who, despite having high salaries are not saving enough money. Tiffany has shared the real-life experiences and stories of her clients and people who have been financially stressed. She has given complete examples of how they have reduced their expenditure, saved enough money, and got out of the financial crisis.
This book helps make us understand how much we can save with our little attention and efforts given to our daily and monthly finances. It is also an eye-opener on how much we spend on unnecessary things and on those things that we can replace with much better and cheap things. This book intends to give precise and reliable information regarding personal finance.
Main points of the book:
1- Every penny has a place
2- How to manage finances
3- How to reduce debt and unnecessary spending
4- How to save more money
5- How to have a money management system in place
Summary:
Aliche has given week by week program to assist you with understanding your own funds, reducing your expenditures so that you can start saving more money.
“Where did my money go?” It is everyone’s most asked question to oneself. When our money is not tracked, planned, and kept a record of, then it disappears like magic. But when the money is used wisely, it will lessen our debt and will not disappear.
She has shared 12 steps that can be completed over seven days. There are also templates provided to fill and see where do we spend our money, how much we spend on which things. She has asked the readers to start making a list of everything on which we spend the money. From groceries and snacks to monthly bills, everything should be written on the list, so that we should become more aware of our expenses. It will make us conscious of where we are spending it.
There are also tips shared in every step for the reader’s assistance. There are also templates provided in every step for the reader’s help. We all have control over our expenses, and we all are capable of controlling our every expense at different levels. There are 3 levels of control on our money list. These are; Fixed, Adjustable, and Easily Adjustable.
The Fixed expenses are the bills that are the same amount each month like rent, mortgage, and car note. Adjustable expenses vary depending on our usage, i.e. Phone bills, Gas, and Electricity. Usually, those bills that shock and awe us each month with how much service we used and their subsequent cost. Easily Adjustable Cash expenses are anything we can and should buy with cash, i.e. Groceries, Entertainment, and Clothes. Most of our lost-but-not-found money is probably wasted at this level.
We can easily reduce our expenses by making little changes in our lives. We can also move to a cheaper place to save extra money. She advises how we can manage to save some money by adjusting our cellphone plan. Our cable bill can also save us many dollars by talking to our cable company. As we do not need 1000 channels, so we can ask them to help reduce it by changing your package. Or we can also switch to another cheaper cable provider. By doing this, you will be able to lower your cable bill and still maintain your normal TV schedule.
We can also reduce our electricity bill by changing regular light bulbs to energy-saving bulbs.
If you have to buy breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, then this money could potentially be saved for your savings. For example, we can bring our food from home. This can also save us some dollars. Also, we may even lose a little weight in the process.
Each dollar that we earn should have a meaningful purpose. She further recommends that we should set up five accounts: Deposit Account, Bills Account, Emergency Account, Long-Term Savings Account, and Good old-fashioned cash.
We can organize our money by opening multiple accounts. These accounts will help improve our financial life and save us time and money. She has described briefly about each account that why we should open it, and its benefits. They will keep as much of our money as possible.
She has also provided a blank Account Information sheet in the book. By using it, we will keep a record of all of our accounts. There is a place provided for the name of the account, the account number, user ID/ password, the due date, and important information such as interest rate, contact information, or phone numbers. It will make it easier when we have to call about a certain account. We will no longer have to toss papers around looking for our account information; it will all be in one place.
She says that we can save more money by Prepaying bills. This will also help eliminate a lot of money-related stress. It is difficult to prepay our bills as we have a limited budget and savings. She has also shared the ways we can make this happen. She has shared the two Budget grid templates and systems. The purpose of the Budget Grids is to keep a physical record of your automated finances. She says that she updates her grids every other Saturday morning. It takes about fifteen minutes to complete the process.
Conclusion: It is a good budget workbook with easy to follow instructions and straight to the point. The author guides helpfully on how we can manage our money without any hassle.
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