Start Saving Money: The Ultimate Guide to Budgeting for Financial Success

9 min readJul 19, 2023

Hi! 👋 We’re Spendee. A personal finance app that helps you track your money, plan budgets, and manage income and expenses in an easy and beautiful way 📊 We’re loved by more than 3.000.000+ people around the world. Let's make money tracking simple and enjoyable together!

Save More This Month: Challenge

Challenge yourself this month! We’ll teach you everything you need to know to start a budget and save more money this month. We’ll do this in three steps:

1. Understand why budgeting isn’t a bad word.

2. How to set up your first budget — with real examples.

3. Learn how to use Spendee for your financial success.

Part 1: Budgets Are Your Friend

Budgets take into account how much you earn and how much you are able (or willing) to spend in a certain period of time. Many people see budgets as their enemy, but that’s not true!

Budgets are a limit you don’t want to go over when you spend your money.

They have a huge positive impact on your life:

📊 Budgets are visual guides to support your financial decisions. It’s much easier to understand the big picture and make the right purchases when you divide your money into smaller pieces.

🛍️ Budgets support intentional spending. Life doesn’t have to be super boring on a budget — you can actually budget for things that bring you joy and improve the quality of your life while leaving out expenses that are only draining you and your wallet.

💃 Budgets allow you to live your best life. They help you accomplish your goals and desires. If you are saving money now, you can use it for your investments or start your own business later.

💪 Budgets know the hard work behind every penny. They want to give your money the best purpose so that your work doesn’t go to waste.

Budgets page in Spendee, showing different budgets.

Part 2: Start a Budget

Don’t give yourself a big headache over which “method” to choose. It doesn’t matter as much as you think it does:

“The best way to stick to a budget is to start one.”

Every one of us has different levels of income, spending habits, and debt, and comes from diverse parts of the world. That’s why there isn’t a correct way to do it, you just need to start. It might not be “perfect” at first. Just don’t be hard on yourself. By reading this article, you’re doing better than the majority of the population! You will have a better understanding of how you can start and you can simply adjust it as you go!

50/30/20 Rule 💡

First, let's get familiar with the universal 50/30/20 rule — dividing your net income into separate parts like this:

50% Essentials: Maximum half of your income should be used for living expenses — your “needs”. This includes rent or mortgage, minimum debt payments, utilities, groceries, and transportation.
30% Personal: This is the most flexible part of your spending and can give you some wiggle room to determine if you really want certain things in your life. This is money towards nonessentials but enhances your lifestyle — things such as entertainment, travel, pets, gym memberships, dining out, hobbies, or any other lifestyle choices.
20% Savings: Experts recommend saving at least 20% of your net income every month. You can put this towards any savings goals, emergency fund, or investments.

Pay Yourself First 👑

The main goal of budgeting is to save as much money as you can, right? That's why many people start their budgeting month with the pay-yourself-first method: putting a certain % of your money aside right after receiving it. If you're paid irregularly, you can do it every week. And of course, if you're not comfortable with allocating 20% to your savings, you can start with a lower number. It's about starting and getting better!

Where should you put the money? 🤔 Shortly — Build yourself an emergency fund that is easily accessible and consists of 3–6 months of your average expenses. Pay off your debts. Focus on further growing your money through investing and keep educating yourself!

Choose a Time Period 🕓

Your expenses can be divided into fixed and variable spending. Fixed spendings occur in the same amount during the period (rent, utilities, insurance, subscriptions) and are usually harder to change. Variable expenses are the ones that vary from month to month (food, shopping, gifts, travel, etc.). Your budgets and their duration should be set depending on the type of expense. There are different time frames to choose from:

daily,
weekly,
bi-weekly,
monthly,
yearly,
custom.

For this article, let’s do a combination of monthly & weekly budgets.

Choose a Size of your Budget 💰

Let's learn through an example. Simon’s living in the EU — and his net income is 1800 EUR. He wants to start saving money — so for a successful start, he used the 50/30/20 rule and chose to pay himself first and put aside 20% of his income — which is 360 EUR.

But what does he do with the remaining 80%? Simon decided to spend it wisely, following various types of budgets.

➡️ First of all, he created a monthly budget for all of the remaining 80%.

Simon put aside 20% (360 EUR) and is left with 80% (1440 EUR) to budget for all his expense categories.

➡️ Second, he realized that he should also set up a budget for his most variable categories and track those separately on a weekly basis. After carefully analyzing his variable spending habits, he found out that he should be spending much less on Food. What an idea for a weekly budget! “Food” is more than just one category — so he chose to create a budget including these categories: Groceries, Eating Out & Drinks.

The suggested allocation for food is 10–15% of your net income, so he chose to set aside 15% — and that’s 67,5 EUR weekly (270 EUR monthly).

Woo-hoo! Weekly Budget created 🎉 Next step is sticking to it — and that’s where Spendee became his best budgeting friend!

Sticking to a Budget 🤝

After days of responsible shopping & following our 20 Tips on How to Save on Groceries, he did very well: he just reached 50% of his budget, so we reminded him with a notification. On the last day of his budgeting, Simon realized that he actually spent 48,5 euros on food this week, which is 19 euros less than his limit!

The first week was successfully completed!

Real Results ✅

After following his monthly budget along with his weekly budget for food, he realized that his extra savings were 212 EUR altogether 🤩 He saved 72 euros on Food and 140 euros on other Categories! 👏🏼

If he could budget similarly throughout the year, his additional savings could be around 2500 EUR yearly, if not more. And that’s not everything! 🔥 Remember how he put aside 20% of his net income from savings every month? That’s 4320 EUR just for following this simple budgeting step! 😎 Overall, his total savings were 6820 EUR yearly. This way, he could afford a nice vacation with his family & still have a reasonable chunk of savings left for future investments and savings.

Part 3: More Tips For Financial Success

At Spendee, our main goal is to make money management easy. You just set up your first budget — but it will be up to you to create the best environment and habits that support your spending. Here are a few things that will help:

Connect your bank account or e-wallets 🏦

See all of your money in one place! 👀 Every transaction that you pay by card will get automatically imported and categorized to Spendee and you don’t have to worry about it. We’re supporting more than 7500 financial providers around the world — so try out yours in our free trial! 🤗

Create a habit out of Spendee 🔥

Update Spendee regularly to truly experience its power! 💪 If you don’t have your bank account connected and you prefer to update your Spendee manually, add a transaction right after it was made ✅ It takes just a few seconds 🤗

Set up scheduled (recurring) transactions 🔄

Did you decide to track expenses manually? Do you have an expense that you pay every month? 🗓 Is it rent, an internet bill, or insurance?💰 Add those transactions into Spendee in the beginning and set a repeating rule for them. To set a recurring transaction, first, add your transaction — select category and amount and then scroll down on the same screen to set a frequency of repeating.

💡 Tip: Schedule every transaction you know will happen. Are you going to buy another gym membership? Pay a personal trainer? Go to hairdressers? Renew your public transport card? This way, you will stay organized and no last-minute expenses will surprise you.

Utilize the Cash Flow Graph 📊

Your future transactions (scheduled & recurring) are already taken into account in your cash flow graph! 😍 That way, you can see how much you actually saved this month.

Timeline page with all transactions and monthly cash-flow.

Stay Motivated — See Your Wealth Grow 📈

The biggest benefit of Spendee is seeing all of your money in one place — so if you've been successful with budgeting, you will see your total wealth grow over time! ✅

Wallets page showing different Wallets and total wealth.

Reorganize categories 🥐

Did you know that you can rename and organize categories to your liking? 👌🏼 We recommend using only some well-arranged categories — simplicity is powerful! If you want to dig deeper into organizing, labels are an ideal tool made exactly for that. ⬇️

Organize labels ✅

Labels are tags that are independent of categories & add more detail about your transaction. For example — you can label if the purchase is a need or a want 💸 Here are more ideas:

That dinner you just had fell into the Food & Drink category. If you used subcategories, maybe you’d go for “restaurant”. 🤷🏼‍♂️ That’s where labels come in handy. Because that meal is also a “Dinner 🍽”, more specifically “Pizza 🍕” that you had on a “Date 💘” in “Italy 🇮🇹” and you paid for it by “Card 💳”.