A simple way toillustrate how you spend money is with a simple budget pie chart. The total absolute amount is less important for this exercise, but the proportions of how the pieces are divided up are. I love the idea of seei… See more

But before we get into drawing our budget pie charts, I’m sure you may already know there are ‘recommended’ percentages of what proportion of your income should go to certain categories. While I appreciate the intent to tr… See more

Doing this thinking at the end of the year is ideal because you can reflect on the past year’s distribution of your take home pay spending as a starting point to plan for next year. Think to yourself, when you do this exercise in … See more

You can also use thefree pie chart maker tool from Canva (scroll down this page to see where to pull in the pie chart feature). Make big-picture categories that fit into the context of your life, lumping things together where that … See more

What stands out to me is how few categories there really are in our present life, now having no non-mortgage debt… and that our giving is smaller than we’d like for this past year. There are reasons for that, but stil… See more