Do what works for you
Matthew Tuttle, owner of Tuttle Wealth Management, a financial management company, had a lot of great information gleaned from working with clients (and their money). Matthew offered the following advice:

“I’m not a big fan of budgets. I’m not a big fan of trying to impose that discipline on someone who just can’t do it. I also find a lot of times spouses vehemently disagree when it comes to budgeting. What I am much more a fan of is, save as much as you can and if you’re saving as much as you can, as long as you’re not going into debt, then I don’t necessarily care where you’re spending your money.

So if I go to someone who is not saving anything and say, ‘I need you to start putting away 20% of your income every year,’ it’s not going to happen. It’s like the idea of boiling a frog. You dump a frog in boiling water it’s going to jump out. So I like to start slow. ‘This month let’s put away 1%.’ Then next month we’re going to bump it up to 2%. Then we’re going to bump it up to 3%, and we’re going to slowly get you used to living on less and less and less and get to a point where you’re saving as much as you possibly can.”