Overview

A budget is a tool to estimate your expenses over a future time period (typically, monthly). There are two essential budgeting steps: Creating, Tracking.

The goals for creating a budget are:

1. 1. Give you an opportunity to review your expenses over the last few months
   2. Help you identify cashflow leaks (i.e., expenses that add little to no benefit to your life such as unused or redundant subscriptions, account fees, and consumer debt interest)
   3. Find some of the easy wins to minimize expenses
   4. Explore ways to change things and live within your cashflow
   5. Allocate money differently to improve financial growth
   6. Identify follow-up actions to manage your cashflow

The goals for tracking expenses to a budget are:

1. 1. Identify the need to modify the budget due to lifestyle changes
   2. Identify problem areas in budget or expenses that need resolution.
   3. Identify what is working and not working for your cashflow.

Creating a budget

Budgets in Thrivasium are setup on an account by account basis. This account-based financial budgeting approach supports transfers in and out of the account cleanly. For example, the budget for a credit card account can include transfers into the account (e.g., payments, refunds, cash rebate awards). Where you spend your money should follow the priorities in your life. A budget will help steer your finances in that direction.

Within Thrivasium, you can create a static monthly budget, a rotating 3-month (quarterly) budget, or a 12-month (annual) budget. Although monthly budgets are common, an annual budget allows estimates of infrequent or seasonal expenses to be included.

You can personalize the level of details in your budget anywhere from a heuristics (quick, non-optimal) to a fully-optimized subcategory-based dollar-by-dollar budget.

Although there are many ways to create a budget, popular budget methodologies include: 50-30-20 Rule, Dollar Allocation, Envelope Method. Thrivasium supports all three of these popular methodologies.

Tracking expenses to a budget

Measuring your current month’s expenses to your budget reference will give you insight into your money and lifestyle habits in addition to the actual numbers. Real progress toward your financial vision comes from small daily commitments – the micro habits. Just tiny everyday actions that, over time, compound into significant positive change. The real budgeting goal, then, is to develop these micro habits to minimize expenses continually and maximize incomes.

Summary

Thrivasium provides the tools to create account-based budgets and track your future expenses against those budget targets. Thrivasium’s charts also provide further insight into expenses by category.

Beyond the numbers, the real budgeting goal, then, is to develop small habits to minimize expenses continually and maximize incomes. This approach opens up financial steps to be more effective and encourages better personal financial habits for growth. And, that is what this is about: optimizing your financial habits to achieve your financial vision.