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The Basics of Family Budgeting

With many years of credit counseling experience under our belts since 1987, we can say with certainty that the lack of a family budget is the ESSENTIAL ingredient that separates successful families from the ones that are chronic under-achievers. In all those years we’ve NEVER encountered the first family that was financially successful that didn’t have a written budget.

Most people get stuck in life lower than they should be because of their thinking. They think a certain way and it produces certain results. All thinking produces results. Where you are in life as you’re reading this report is a composite result of what you have been thinking about over your life, especially recently. If your thinking has been good, if it’s been wise, you’ve had good results. But if you don’t like where you are in life, then you’re going to have to change what you’re doing. And if you want to change what you’re doing, you have to change what you’re thinking. If what you’ve been doing and thinking has resulted in chronic financial crisis and frustration, it stands to reason that you need to make some changes. If you don’t, you’ll stay the same.

If you’ve been thinking you can be successful and get along without a budget in your home like 85 percent of Americans think, then you’re going to have to change that thinking because a foundational biblical principle of financial stewardship is that you have to write down your financial vision if you expect to get anywhere (Habakkuk 2:2). You can’t get along without one and you’ll have to write it down and let everybody in your family see it and know what’s in it. That’s why BUDGETING is Step One on the Road to the Financial Victory we’ve depicted on this website.

You’ll notice we’re calling this written plan a Family Budget. We’ve been calling it by that name since the beginning in even though many counselors prefer to call it something else because many people have a negative reaction to the word BUDGET.  Some call it a FINANCIAL PLAN, A SPENDING PLAN, a SHORT TERM FINANCIAL STRATEGY or some other high-end term. But we still call it a BUDGET because that’s the best description of it.

It’s interesting that the Bible depicts indebtedness as a Curse in one place (Deuteronomy 28:44) and as enslavement in another (Proverbs 22:7). God called it a Curse and what that second verse says is that the rich rule over the poor and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave. That’s the problem with indebtedness: the one who’s in debt has no choice but to live life as a slave to his/her creditors. We can ignore these verses but that doesn’t change the TRUTH and which is why it’s so difficult for personal debt and financial success to co-exist.

After almost two generations, the contemporary family has come to the point of being desensitized to their indebtedness. They look on it as just another necessity of life and are so dependent on their credit cards they can’t think of a lifestyle without them. But if they had a Family Budget and if they would try to live by it, they would find that they would be able to live without debt, they could learn to live within their means and they could even come to a place where they had contingency savings and wouldn’t need to “reach for the plastic” whenever an emergency comes up.

The Bottom Line is that your family desperately needs a BUDGET. To have a budget and actually use it WILL change your life. It will transform you from a life of anxiety and fear to a life of confidence and hope. It will turn a lifetime of financial failure into success and prosperity. A Family Budget is just one little page if you use the simple form we’ve included in this Report, but it’s the most powerful page you’re ever going to find outside of the Bible. Open your heart to receive the instruction in this Report and you’ll soon change your thinking. Change your thinking and you’ll change your life!

Go to this link to purchase an inexpensive comprehensive instruction book. It will change your life:

Go to this link for a free budget form: 

Go to this link for a free introductory article: