The budgeting hack that's helped my family build an emergency fund - Business Insider

was to base our budget off of the lowest income amount we could comfortably live off of, and then sock the rest away. This can be really difficult to do, especially if you love to spend money when you have it. "Lifestyle creep" is a real issue for many — that's when you spend more to upgrade your lifestyle whenever your income goes up.

First, we conducted an inventory of all fixed expenses by combing through three months' worth of bills to make sure we weren't missing anything. so that I could monitor what exactly we were spending our money on, and how much. After that, we set spending targets for variable expenditures, such as groceries, dining out, home improvement, and entertainment. And then, finally, I checked in on our Mint account every week to categorize expenses and make sure we were on track towards our spending targets. Even in the months when we made more, we did our best to stick to the spending target amounts we had set originally.

Trying to build savings can be difficult in the society we live in. Advertisements, societal norms, cultural expectations, the convenience of online shopping, family/friends' opinions, and "keeping up with the Joneses" are just a few of the underlying reasons why so many Americans have very little saved. There are, including automating your savings, budgeting savings in, getting a side hustle to put towards savings, and banking bonuses or tax returns instead of spending them.

In our case, the method that has worked best has been a combination of living on a set amount of our income regardless of how much we make and making sure our savings is automated and budgeted in so the saving actually happens.

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