Budgeting remains a top priority for Americans in 2025, with 42% focusing on debt reduction, 21% saving for major purchases, and 14% planning for retirement, according to a report from the Certified Financial Planner Board (CFP). To discuss the best budgeting strategies for 2025, Break Your Budget founder Michela Allocca joins Wealth.
Allocca emphasizes that the foundation of effective budgeting begins with "taking a financial snapshot." She advises individuals to "audit" their financial accounts and "understand your paycheck deductions and cash flow" while carefully evaluating monthly spending patterns.
For budget structuring, she advocates for a "zero-based, three-bucket" approach that "allocates every dollar of income" across three categories: essentials, non-essentials, and financial goal expenses.
To maintain budget adherence, Allocca recommends establishing "a weekly money date." This involves dedicating 10 minutes each week to updating expenses, tracking numbers, reviewing spending patterns, comparing actual spending against the original budget, and making adjustments as needed.
"It’s super, super normal for your budget to change, for your priorities to change, for things to come up. And I think what a lot of people struggle with is, once one small thing goes awry, they completely throw their budget to the wind, and they say, ‘I’ll do it again next month.’ But … you should just make some small adjustments; you can make some tweaks and realign your spending, realign your budget, and that will really help with actually sticking to the original plan," she tells Yahoo Finance.
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