Is there any way that you could have solid abs in just six days? It is hard to say for sure, but you can have a solid budget in just a few months. One of the challenges to getting out of debt habit is effective budgeting. When you want a solid abs you cannot just go exercise once and a while, you have to effectively workout every day. There is no difference in escaping from the stack of endless bills; you need to effective utilize your finances every day. You can survive without knowing how to budget if you manage to keep more money coming in than flowing out or having credit cards to cover the gap, but this will not last forever. People often resort to budgeting after they have already been dealing with expenses and income in a back-of-the-envelope kind of way. A budget is an estimate, often itemized, of expected income and expenses for a given period in the future, not written on the back of an envelope.
The crux of planning your budget is the emergency fund. In general, traditional budgeting starts with tracking expenses, eliminating debt and, once the budget is balanced, building an emergency fund is the key. To speed up the process, we are going to start by building a partial emergency fund. “Ideally, everyone should have at least one or two months’ wages sitting in a money market account for any unpleasant surprises. This emergency fund acts as a buffer as the rest of the budget is put in place, and should replace the use of credit cards for emergency situations” (Batie 2003, online).
You will want to build your emergency fund as quickly as possible. For someone who lives in a rented home and has only a modest amount of debt, an emergency fund of $600 may work fine. If you own a house, a car and other things that can unexpectedly require cash infusions, they your emergency fund will need to be bigger. The key is to build the fund at regular intervals, consistently devoting a certain percentage of each paycheck toward it and, if possible, putting in...