What is the right budgeting technique?
I’ve been using a basic 50/30/20 budget for a while, mostly because it’s simple enough that I can actually stick to it.
But lately my expenses have been getting tighter, so I started looking into budgeting more seriously instead of just splitting money into broad buckets and hoping it works out.
I went down the rabbit hole a bit and found a bunch of different approaches:
- 50/30/20 budgeting
- zero-based budgeting
- envelope system
- pay yourself first
- cash flow forecasting
- reverse budgeting
- anti-budgeting
- values-based budgeting
- bucket/multiple-account systems
- spreadsheet/manual budgeting
Now I’m wondering if 50/30/20 is a good long-term system, or if it’s more of a beginner-friendly starting point.
For people who have actually stuck with budgeting for a long time, what approach ended up working best in real life?